To mark Rolling Stone’s 50th anniversary, we chatted with celebrated artist Mr Baron Wolman.

Ms Janis Joplin never made a music video. Mr Jimi Hendrix didn’t have (or indeed need) a stylist. There may now be an @officialthewho Instagram feed, but Mr Pete Townshend wasn’t dressing for the ’grams back in 1967. Instead, you could only find their most candid photos – and those of their now-legendary peers – in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine. And Rolling Stone, in turn, depended largely on one man to create those images: Mr Baron Wolman, the magazine’s first chief photographer.

To coincide with Rolling Stone’s 50th anniversary this year, MR PORTER has worked with Sonic Editions to offer some limited-edition framed prints of Mr Wolman’s work. To quote the poet Mr Rod Stewart, every picture tells a story, and no one can tell these stories quite like the man who took them. So we spoke with Mr Wolman – now 80 years young – from his home in Santa Fe to learn how he created these iconic images. How he coaxed Ms Joplin into giving the so-called Concert for One. How he found romance in the turmoil of Altamont Speedway Free Festival in San Francisco, which was marred by violence in 1969. And how he, at the age of 30 and living in the city’s Haight-Ashbury, wound up joining the most famous rock magazine of all time.

On joining Rolling Stone for its 1967 launch – for free

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I was willing to work for free because they gave me stock in the company. I don’t know why I was smart enough to [do] that. If someone were to say that now, you know the publisher would say no way. I was willing to roll the dice with my time and energy.

On co-founder Mr Jann Wenner’s precocity

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There was never any doubt in my mind that he was capable of doing something special. He was really smart, he loved music, he loved the musicians. He was basically a groupie himself – still is. But he was a very good writer, and a very good editor, and when we started, he was only 21 years old. To come across somebody that age, that confident, how could you not invest yourself into an association with somebody like that?

On Mr Pete Townshend’s appetite for destruction

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That was my first live concert assignment for Rolling Stone, at the Cow Palace [arena near San Francisco]. The Who weren’t even the headliners. Pete destroying his guitar was a shock to me because I didn’t realise it was part of the shtick. I was paralysed because I thought if I did that with my Nikon, how am I gonna take pictures? And if he’s doing that with his guitar, how is he gonna play music? And of course it was a cheap guitar and they had a whole bunch of ’em in the back.

On Mr Frank Zappa, father of invention

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There was a bunch of road-grading equipment up on the hill behind his house. That’s where we started taking pictures. And he just really got into it. There was a frozen orange juice can that was lying on the ground, and he picked it up as if it were an object of art. I mean, this was all his idea, man. That session he did so many things on his own that reflected the crazy creativity that you heard in his music.

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Zappa and I got along really, really well. And I was surprised because I was terrified of the guy because he’s so smart and so creative. I didn’t know what I was gonna find, and he basically gave me the pictures on a silver plate.

On taking a bad picture of Mr Jimi Hendrix

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“Hendrix also had that visual power. While Zappa was extraordinary in every sense of the word, you could not take a bad picture of Jimi Hendrix. It was impossible. He was always dressed well. He always presented himself uniquely, dressed uniquely.”

On Ms Janis Joplin and the “Concert for One”

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After Rolling Stone began to get successful, the other magazine publishers started to take notice. They realised that the counterculture was a market that they wanted to reach. So Hearst comes along with a full-color counterculture magazine to compete. They hired a lot of us as freelancers, which we liked because they had money and Rolling Stone had none.

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They said we need some color pictures of Janis Joplin, and in particular we want Janis in concert. I said I’ve been shooting in black and white, but I’ll get back to you. So I called Janis, because she lived in the neighbourhood. And I said: “What do you got coming up?” She said: “I have nothing scheduled.” I said: “OK, here’s what we’ll do. I’m gonna set up the studio as if it were a stage, with lighting that looks like stage lighting. Bring a microphone, and you can lip-sync, and we can simulate the performance.” And she said: “Fine, we’ll do that.”

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So she brought over a little tape deck and a microphone. We started taking pictures, and she started lip-syncing for about five minutes. Then she decided she wanted to sing. She sang kind of quietly, then began to build and build and build until she forgot that she was in a photo studio and she thought she was on stage. She gave me a concert! She sang for an hour, all of her famous songs.

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It was just me [in the studio]. My wife came home because the studio was in the house. She heard Janis singing, so she ran down to Haight Street to the flower shop, and bought a rose because Janis had that whole thing with the rose. And she came up and presented it to Janis, and everybody had a really good cry.

On Mr Jim Morrison’s presence (and lack thereof)

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“n every picture I took of him he looked like he was stoned. Or put it this way: he was singing in a parallel universe. And he held onto that microphone the whole time. It’s almost like if he didn’t hold onto it he was gonna fall over.

On taking a beautiful, even sexy photo amidst the turmoil at Altamont

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I mean, people are still people.