Interlude: Remembering Herb Greene

One of the preeminent photographers of the 1960s and '70s rock scene in San Francisco died last week, and I among many others — including every last Deadhead on the planet — lost a dear friend.

[Note: This entire post, not only this bracketed aside, is out of step with the “Jog” series. A further word by way of warning: It’s a long post, 4,000+ words. Like, Yikes!, no one posts nearly 4,500 words and expects anyone to read them! Well, that remains true. But anyway: This, which is part of no series, is being written now, in the real time of March 2025, and not five years ago during the COVID year, as was all of the stuff and nonsense of my “Little Jog Through the Neighborhood” series, which will, after this interlude, return, and continue to dominate this Substack site for much of 2025 (something you might be sad to hear). Anyway: Herb Greene, a dear friend, died last week, on March 3^rd. Herbie did figure briefly in the ongoing and just-mentioned “Little Jog” series; he appeared in the post involving Jerry Garcia’s guitars, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and my trip to see Sox-v-Yanks up at Yankee Stadium with my son and one of our two daughters. Herbie was the guy who had made portraits of Jerry. I later met Herbie through Ken Marsolais at the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts two decades ago. Any recall of that stuff? “No” is a fine answer. Anyway, as James Thurber and Ring Lardner both said, you could look it up; he’s in there, in the series. And anyway . . . Be all that as it may: The following has, as implied, nothing at all to do with the “Jog” series, but everything to do with Herbie. It’s something I’m compelled to write for myself, and to share with you, just now. Of course, you understand the impetuses (BTW, there is no such plural as “impeti”; I wondered about that, and checked). Hope you enjoy meeting the Herbie I knew, a thoroughly wonderful person whom I thought the world of. And lastly, also just by the way, as you’ve already guessed, that portrait above is of Herbie. It was made in the kitchen of his home in 2015 by the photographer Caroline Sullivan. There’s a story behind the picture, and in comes near the end of this post.]

I lost a friend a week ago when Herb Greene died in Maynard, Massachusetts, in the medium-sized, well-kept house he shared with his beloved wife, Ilze. Herbie was 82 and beset by pancreatic cancer. Eighty-two’s not bad when one considers that Herb, a native of Inigo, California, hung out in San Francisco for an extended period in the 1960s and ’70s — not only the pre-pre- and proto-Summer of Love but the ugly hangover that inevitably followed. Out on the Left Coast back in the day, Herbie counted among his friends such folks as Jerry and Janis. They were sweet friends no doubt, but not what you’d call health-conscious or “good influences.”

Herbie was very much part of that scene out there. He was a figure in it, a fixture. He was the one with the lens, not the ax or the mic. He shot the scene, a scene that regularly shot back. Herbie finally knew he had to get out and he did, which was a good thing, perhaps even a nick-o’-time thing.

In a subsequent, calmer chapter in his life, he and Ilza watched the daughters grow; they were lovingly with him when he died. He had grandkids. He and Ilze had a garden in Maynard that they co-tended, and that gave them a good deal of happiness. It was all very fine, and as I said: 82’s not bad. Herbie had a wonderful life. God bless him and keep him.

I came to know the Second Act Herbie professionally and then personally, as a friend. That’s what I’m going to write a bit about. The outline of his life can be found in real obituaries elsewhere online. I can be relied on only to tell you about the Herbie I knew, who was a lovely guy, an authentic American beauty. This will not be an obit but a reminiscence or an appreciation or whatever the heck it might become — perhaps a mess.

Where to start (unless we’ve already started)?

Well, let me throw in a space-break, and we’ll see.

*

Herb with his Nikon — as much as Jorma and Carlos with their Gibsons and Garcia with his Wolf and Tiger; the Family Dog with its colorful sense of style; Robert Hunter with his evocative lyrics; John Barlow, too, alongside Ace; Ginsberg with his fierce poetry and Didion with her New Journalistic prose — Herb with his camera was an important part of that significant place and time and he was, although he would modestly and attractively demur, that place-and-time’s best visual chronicler. (You mention Jim Marshall? I say Herb Greene.)

Proof of Herbie’s artistry is on display in hundreds of portraits, but I think his keen storytelling-within-a-frame genius is best witnessed in the Rancho Olompali pool party pictures and certainly his famous Grateful Dead/Haight-Ashbury street-corner image. You, my loyal Substack readers ­— you happy few! — can look this stuff up. I would love to illustrate this remembrance with The Best of Herb Greene, but I don’t have the bandwidth nor the sources — in all ways, the resources. And I don’t want to be distracted. And you who care about the pictures (as you should) can easily find what I’m talking about, perhaps well-rendered on high-quality paper. Perhaps in the illustrated books on the Grateful Dead. Certainly in the LIFE book on the Dead: Lots of Herb represented there, I can promise you that. You might even be able to find Best-of-Herb’s on the Boston Museum of Fine Arts website. I don’t know that for sure. I do know they have Herb’s photography in their permanent collection.

Herbie’s decisions in each Olompali image, where the action seems so casual and real, can be discerned. It’s all black-and-white. The band is both the focus of the shooter, and not so much; the guys are just hanging, looking at Herbie but not focusing on the lens a la whatever the latest British Invasion combo might would be doing. Jerry seems to be saying something to Herbie, Phil is distracted or not, which means he’s distracted. Everything you need to know about the Dead is said. Hangin’ out. The milieu, too — chill.

And another milieu: The Haight-Ashbury street sign is so very unassuming and seems to be needing a clean. It’s just a pole and two nameplates with these guys slouching. Hangin’ out. Yesterday Haight-Ashbury meant nothing – a corner, an innocuous intersection in a city of inscrutable hillsides and twisty streets with lots of odd intersections — but today we all know Haight-Ashbury, and this is it? Yes, this is it. Or was. So: The frame says everything about the band and its scene, even about the many mattresses on the many floors in those surrounding Victorian rowhouses, as well as the stashes of weed and pills and needles and dope therein — those are all implied. The image’s greyness confronts the backstory, the yang to the yin of the Be-In/Flower Power/Ken Kesey/Timothy Leary/Bay Area scene, delineating that yang as deftly as Didion did in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Herbie Greene and Joan Didion were telling the same complicated story. They had good friends there, they had good times there, and at times they worried about the others who were crashing in those rowhouses — crashing in various ways. They also worried, occasionally, about themselves.

Those paragraphs there are what you might call my extended lede, and as such their job was to set up what’s to follow. To explain things. In a way: To both entice and outline.

They didn’t do a very good job. I know.

About that, I’m sorry, but, well, just now . . .

I think I want to get to the personal. I’m undecided whether to segue to my Mickey Mantle/Jerry Garcia story about how I met Herb, or to a fine day 20 years after that in Herbie and Ilze’s kitchen table in Massachusetts.

Thoughts? . . .

*

Well, I guess I’ll go in that order — meeting Herb, and then we’ll revisit the latter visit. Chronological order usually makes sense.

Herb Greene was unknown to me in 1995. I was working at LIFE, which was then a monthly magazine, and our managing editor (thus my boss) was Jay Lovinger, who already knew that I appreciated sports and music just as he did. Jay said, “Jerry Garcia died a few days ago.” I knew this very well. Jay paused, as Jay would. He was always pausing and pondering. “Mickey Mantle died too.” I knew this too. Jay paused again, pondered some more. “Yes,” I said finally.

“You think?” Jay, who might have been wearing his tie-dye T-shirt, which he wore more than you might think, even though he worked at the Time & LIFE Building in midtown Manhattan, where other editors wore sports coats at least and sometimes neckties — Jay asked, “You think there’s anything to say about that — those two, Mickey and Jerry, dying at the same time? They meant a lot to people like me and you. Anything there?” Jay didn’t mean anything cosmological (although maybe he did?). He meant particularly: Anything worth writing about for our readers?

I knew what, in a nuts-and-bolts fashion, he had in mind. In this period, LIFE opened each month with a two-page spread called “The Big Picture” which usually involved one, sometimes two sensational, mind-grabbing photographs played large, plus a few words about why we considered these photos relevant at this particular American Moment. If there was a fierce drought plaguing the Midwest, for instance, we might choose to show a parched landscape in Iowa. If Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos had sent up a rocket, we might run liftoff, and if both had sent up rockets that same month, we might run two photos accompanied by a mini-essay on “The New Space Racers.” Or, say, if they had both screwed some pooch (as the real jet fliers used to say (per Tom Wolfe and then San Shepard in The Right Stuff), and let’s say those two Bozos had screwed pooches with their rocketry and meantime messed up the federal government and Kay Graham’s/Ben Bradlee’s/Bob Woodward’s/Carl Bernstein’s/Marty Baron’s Washington Post to boot — all in the same month — think it over; not impossible? — we might’ve commented on that, with much-too-easy-to-source goofy photos of the Bozos in question.

Jay rephrased, “Can you give us something about Mantle and Garcia representing something in America?”

I said I’d try.

I did try, and wrote this tone-poem-y text block to run beneath the headline “Requiem for a Hero”:

He was born to his talent and his trade; he was an American traditionalist; he was an unassuming prodigy; he gained early fame and revolutionized his game; he was Huck Finn charismatic — but also, he was made for our age and drew millions of kids to the arena; he was beloved by his teammates and only reluctantly assumed the role of leader; uneasy in the spotlight, he was head-down modest after stunning his audience with an awesome solo shot; by nature he was a happy man — but a man with private pain and conflict; his weaknesses were apparent — he abused his body regularly, contributing to his too early death; he died gracefully, trying to get well; he was mourned by his generation, and by those both older and younger; he was a giant, an original, an American beauty. He was not just admired by his fans, he was loved. He was Mickey Charles Mantle, the Mick; and he was Captain Trips, Jerome John Garcia.

I will not defend the quality of the paragraph or disown it these many years later. I will say it was honestly done. While obviously the product of a biased, still pretty young guy who had been a keen fan of both men, I meant what I said, and I enjoyed thinking about Mickey and Jerry. I thanked Jay, one of the best editors I or any writer ever had, for the assignment.

LIFE’s Photography Editor, David Friend, chose two portraits to accompany the words, each picture showing its subject in his early twenties. The rookie-year Mantle image was from our own archive and had been made in 1951 by George Silk, a LIFE legend, one of our and Sports Illustrated’s finest shooters of the postwar years. The wonderful picture of Jerry was also a black-and-white, fashioned in 1964 by Herb Greene, who had posed the musician with his banjo in front of a huge American flag.

Annabelle Garcia, born in 1970 to Jerry and Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Adams, once said the flag had traveled everywhere with Jerry in the 1960s, and “the shared history of this flag and our family could not have happened in any other country.” I wish I’d noticed that quote when writing the double-tribute to Mickey and Jerry in ’95. I also wish I’d noticed that the men were about same age when the pictures had been made. I might have come up with something about the bloom of youth or some such nonsense. But anyway . . .

Up in Massachusetts, having skedaddled from San Francisco some years before and now clean as a whistle, this photographer whom I did not know, name of Herb Greene, received his copies of LIFE. I know that he was pleased to be involved in our Big Picture feature because, out-of-the-blue, I received a thank you along with a box of signed prints. I sent Mr. Greene a note of appreciation in turn, and we stayed in touch. We finally met when that mutual friend from the earlier Substack post, Ken Marsolais, organized a fundraiser for the arts centeless than a mile from where Luci and I and the kids lived here in Mount Kisco. Ken had come up with an idea — or Herbie had suggested it to him — that if Ken were to print a couple dozen photostatic copies of the LIFE spread, Herbie and I could attend his gala and sign them, and they in turn could be sold to raise funds for the arts center. Plans were hatched. Exactly how everybody happened to know everybody else and how everything came into sharp focuc for Ken — became a plan — that, I still haven’t figured out, all these years later. I’ll say it was the cosmos at work. The cosmos factory.

I had never met Herb Greene so didn’t know how to recognize Herb but when, almost as soon as Luci and I entered the main gallery of the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, I was hugged by this stranger who had dashed across the room — a small, nimble, long-haired fellow. I assumed this to be Herb Greene. I assumed correctly. Our friendship was sealed. Herb always made friends quickly and sealed friendships quicker.

*

During time spent together as we traveled down the years I learned Herbie’s backstory. I was told of his heritage, his hazy-crazy San Francisco days and nights, his move West to East. You already know what you need to know about what I learned — facts and such — from a sentence or two in the obits.

I did learn that Herb loved and admired Jerry as a friend from even before the Warlocks. The more I came to know about Herb and to learn about Jerry, the better I understood how close they’d been. I realized as I grew to know Herb better that he, Jerry and many of the musicians you associate with the San Francisco scene were just about a decade older than I was — Herb, as mentioned right off the bat, was 82 when he died last week, and I’m 71. They and Jay Lovinger, all of whom had been born in the 1940s, and I and my ’50’s cohort of Boomers shared a lot of the same postwar cultural touchstones, and many of us grew up to be what you might call highfalutingly: “adults of a certain socio/politico stripe.” The folks I’m thinking of here are largely liberal-minded, open to ideas, involved. Anyway, I know Lovinger was like that, and I fancy that Jerry and Herbie were like that when together in San Francisco. They probably knew they were sympatico at first glance.

Here’s Herb, recalling his twenties, when he was hanging with the musicians, writers and poets we know of: “There was an availability of the kind of culture we were looking for. Somewhat sophisticated, basically free, the kind of culture we were looking for. It wasn’t Paris, but we had all read Henry Miller, [George Orwell’s] Down and Out in Paris and London, all that stuff. There were common threads that went back to our preteens. There was Mad magazine, The Buster Brown Show got us all. Garcia would always be saying, ‘Hiya, kids, hiya, hiya.’ All those things were common in our youth, and unifying once we were a little older . . . I had friends who went to Selma, friends who went to Vietnam. You had the music thing, which was good, and the whole drug thing, which wasn’t. It was a perfect storm of things.”

Whenever I talked with Herbie, I was in league with everything he said. I heard him clearly.

Herb offered what he just offered — that bit about Mad and Buster Brown — to my tape recorder in 2015 when we at LIFE Books were working on an upcoming LIFE volume on the Grateful Dead to coincide with the upcoming Dead & Company Soldier’s Field shows in Chicago, which, as you Friends of Herbie would suspect, Herbie attended. Herbie helped me considerably with our book, contributing the cover image, many more pictures, a rippling stream of insights and some private phone numbers: David Nelson’s, Robert Hunter’s, Grace Slick’s.

Quick story: I remember I was instructed by Herbie to call Grace at 8 a.m. because she was always up early having her tea on the West Coast at 5, which out there was not yet crack o’ dawn. She would have gone to bed shortly after dusk the previous evening. This was her daily routine. Time and habits certainly had changed. I remember coming away from that conversation with Grace, whom in my happily married seniority I found I could chat with easily enough without hemming, hawing or stuttering, I tookj from our conversation a thought I would only half-use in the LIFE book: That in the youngish plugged-in community of San Francisco’s whirl in the 1960s, two people were beloved by absolutely everyone: Jerry . . . and Herbie. Grace said as much. Jerry and Herbie were sweet, and not everyone was. They were talented men with ambition, certainly, but no aggression, no sense of unfair play, nothing but gentle smiles and good humor reminiscent of, well, Buster Brown. That’s the duo Grace and Dave Nelson and Robert Hunter described for me.

[Sotto voce aside: Our son — my and Luci’s 24-year-old son — is, as you know, a Deadhead of sorts. He’s also a smart kid who likes history, and he knows what’s what. I once mentioned to him that “when I was talking to Grace Slick at 5 a.m. I said . . .” And I left it at that. I didn’t mention that both Grace and I were older and sober. I didn’t even bother to say, “Don’t tell your mother.” I amused myself, letting it hang. You’d have to ask my kid what he got from that, if anything. I’m not really sure he knows what the Grace Slick of the 1960s was capable of doing to the emotions of young lads of, say, the precise age he is at right now.]

We at LIFE decided to run a profile of Herbie in that LIFE book on the Dead. He acceded shyly. I told him I was going to be in Massachusetts to visit relatives over Easter and could drop by Maynard on my way home, reporting the piece myself. He thought that was a fine idea. I said we’d need a picture of him. He did not say he’d supply a self-portrait, asking instead, “Who’d you have in mind?” Meaning: What shooter did I plan to assign?

“Well,” I said, “We could get Joe McNally, or someone else you choose. But I had obe thought I wanted to run by you, Herbie.” I paused, as my boss Lovinger used to do in the halls of LIFE. I pretended to be pondering, just like Jay used to ponder, or pretend to ponder. (Believe me: It’s a strategy. Often quite effective.) I said: “What I was wondering, Herbie, is — Our daughter’s a good shooter. She’s Photo Editor of her college paper. She’s been shooting for several years now. Loves it. Loves working in the dark room. I haven’t broached this idea with her, but I was wondering . . .”

“Of course!” Herbie interrupted, saving me from further embarrassment. “Wonderful!”

My daughter’s session at Herbie and Ilze’s kitchen table in Maynard directly preceded my interview with Herbie. It produced among other things the portrait that accompanies this post. My daughter was shy and hesitant but worked with a seriousness of purpose. Herbie was terrific as I knew he would be, and waited until she had finished her session before looking at her selects in the viewfinder and picking (while always bowing to her opinion) a horizontal option and a vertical. “These are very good,” he said gently. “Can’t say much for your subject.” We shared a laugh. He gave her a few tips. And then he and I talked. What a fine day.

Later, Herbie learned from me that my daughter’s kid brother was, of all new-millennial things, an entry-level Deadhead. (This is the same kid I told you about a few sentences back.) I told Herbie that I’d taken him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see an exhibit of rock artifacts that included Jerry’s customized Wolf and Tiger guitars, and that my kid had seen John Mayer play Wolf, on loan, a couple of days later at CitiField during a Dead & Company show.

Within days, another box of signed prints arrived in the mail, this one addressed to my son. On the matte below the Haight-Ashbury print, Herbie had written some personal words to him and closed with “and the beat goes on and on . . .”

*

So, now, in attempting some closing remarks, let me first say: I’m very sorry.

I’m sorry that I’ve lost my friend, but that’s a selfish comment. I’m sorry Herb’s family has lost him in this particular sphere (as they — they being Herb and Jerry and Hunter — might’ve said upstairs at Michael’s Alley back before the Dead . . . “only in this particular sphere, man” — and I’m sorry for Ilze and Herbie’s daughters and the grandkids and the friends and . . . Well, I do offer my sympathies, and . . .

I’m sorry that what I’ve done here is such an abject failure as a tribute intended for a general audience and just a . . .

. . . just one guy’s scattershot memories. It accomplishes nothing beyond my own saying goodbye to Herb, which is an indulgence when done in a semi-public space. Inexcusable.

I thought I was finding a theme in Herbie and Joan Didion chronicling the real San Francisco story — The story as you know it from the photographs of Herb Greene, who died on March 3, 2025 in . . .

Or maybe, I thought, or hoped, I was on to some kind of postwar continuum with Herbie and Jerry and Buster Brown and me and Luci and now our kids . . .

And then I kept going with the personal stories and thought they might shed light on the kind-hearted Herbie I’ve known down the years . . .

But I kept remembering these little inconsequential things, and they amused me and made me think of Herbie, and I drifted and . . .

So: sorry.

Let me finish my task in the quick-and-easy way. I should’ve done this before leading you astray.

I noticed when I began this, that the way I had begun my profile of Herbie in the LIFE book a decade ago — my lede back then — emphasized that he was not only an artist, but an artist for the ages.

I wonder now if that sentiment might serve equally or even better as a last note, and maybe I should quote from it.

I wonder that now, so let me try this now:

*

Great photographers and journalists gravitate to great events: It’s their job as well as their reason for living. Sometimes — and this is serendipity — great photographers find themselves in the midst of events that hardly seem great in the moment but that are fun and interesting and worth shooting. Millions of frames have been lost to dust because such events prove to be, at day’s end, little more than fun and ephemeral — worth recording in the instant but interesting to no one down the road.

And then there are the blessed surprises.

By the time other photogs started arriving in San Francisco and opening their lenses in the 1960s, San Francisco was already happening. But earlier, when Herb Greene shot the Warlocks, there was certainly no telling that those pictures might be treasures five weeks later, never mind 50 years. The phrase is “in the right place at the right time,” but that tends to diminish the accomplishment and also the talent that has been brought to bear. Herbie was the right photographer in the right place at the right time . . .

*

And it went on from there.

Much of what then followed in the LIFE book derived from the interview in Maynard, during which there was classical music — not the Dead, not the New Riders — playing at low volume throughout the house.

I probably (certainly) should have just followed through with that original plan: Just quote from the profile. That might have been more logical. It certainly would have been much less self-indulgent. It would have been mercifully shorter. Not, Geezus, 4k-plus words!

About that, I will freely admit: Speaking only for myself, I’ve had a fine old time here, both writing this and thinking on Herbie, remembering Herbie. I’ve always had a fine time with Herbie, ever since he gave me that first big hug — one of those good and earnest 1960s hugs, hugs that were meant to mean something . . .

something about love, man.