John Byrne Cooke experienced the 1960s within the music of the counterculture. In the folk-music boom of the early '60s, John was a member of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, bluegrass band, the Charles River Valley Boys, whose musical home was the legendary Club 47. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were among his friends and contemporaries. John recorded two albums with the CRVB and played music from Cambridge to Berkeley and Big Sur.
When rock and roll displaced folk music, John was in the right place at the right time. He was a member of D.A. Pennebaker's film crew at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where Janis and Jimi Hendrix became overnight sensations. When Albert Grossman signed on a few months later to manage Janis and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, he hired John to road manage them. John is the only person who traveled with all three of Janis's bands, from 1967 until her untimely death in 1970.
During his time on the road, John started to take a role as a photographer & filmmaker alike. With a backstage presence and an eye for the right moment, Cooke shot famous icons such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, and of course Janis Joplin. In addition, his video footage spans from Janis’ European tour to the consecutive years of the Newport Folk Festival. After all exhilarating highs of the ’60s & 70’s dissipated, John moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1982 where he wrote, played music, skied, and studied acting until he passed away in September 2017.