Baron Wolman
View more of Baron Wolman's photos at: www.fotobaron.com

Janis lived a few doors down, the Dead were just around the corner, and the kid living upstairs from photographer Baron Wolman took too much acid and walked in delirium out of the third-floor window, splatting fatally onto the hard, filthy pavement of Haight Street below. The year was '67, and everyone was grooving.

Fueled by the music and the times, a 21-year-old journalist named Jann Wenner gathered some friends and began a revolution in ink. Named Rolling Stone, this newsprint rag captured the era, defined it in print and pictures, and helped form a generation. Among the friends that Wenner interested in his project was Wolman, then a 30-year-old freelance photojournalist.

During his fast-paced tenure, Wolman's lens captured the royalty of the '60s pop and rock explosion: Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Iggy Pop, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Phil Spector, Jim Morrison, Ike & Tina Turner, Tim Leary, and a motley cast of hangers-on. When he left the magazine three years later, rock itself had changed.

"The only way for Baron to do the work he did, so close to the performers, so lyrical and intimate, was through access," confirms Rolling Stone editor John Burks. And access is the reason Baron was able to create such intimate images of the Icons of Rock.

View more of Baron Wolman's photos at: www.fotobaron.com