Smith’s gold

You never know what people have in their closets. For instance, take Dale Smith, a Nevada City native and photographer who studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg invited the then 17-year-old student and his camera to snap Bob Dylan and others behind the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. (Some of the shots ended up on Dylan’s Biograph album two decades later.) But that 1965 session soon helped Smith score a press pass that served as entree into myriad musical gigs, including the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Smith’s Memories in a Trunk, at Julie Baker Fine Art, 307 Spring Street in Nevada City, until March 12, is worth the jaunt. It offers a snapshot of the raucous, turbulent ’60s with some never-before-seen portraits of musicians, writers and others who helped define a generation, including Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Robbie Robertson, David Crosby and Buddy Miles. For more information, call (530) 265-9278.