BY THE TIME Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was turbocharging the folk protest movement in the summer of 1963, Albert Grossman had become a wealthy man. His financial advisors suggested it was time to invest some of his money.
Milton and Shirley Glaser had owned a second home on Woodstock’s Lewis Hollow Road for almost a decade. When a checkout girl at the town’s Grand Union supermarket mentioned that a large stone house had come on the market in nearby Bearsville, Shirley took down the details. Fairfields had been home to the late John Striebel, who illustrated the popular Dixie Dugan cartoon strip written by J. P. McEvoy. (Woodstock occasionally appeared in the cartoon as “Stoodwock.”) Following his death in May 1962, Striebel’s widow, Fritzi, decided to sell up and downsize.
“It was always a party house,” says Richard Heppner. “Striebel was a good musician himself and often played with fellow Woodstock artists.” (Other regulars at Fairfields were Sam Eskin and pianist/accordionist Clemmie Nessel, a much-loved Woodstock music teacher.) The asking price for the house, set in almost sixty acres of land, was an eye-watering $50,000. “We didn’t know a single person that had fifty thousand dollars except Albert,” says Milton Glaser. “He had no direct reason why he would be interested in Bearsville, outside of the fact that people often called him bearlike.” (As it happened, the hamlet of Bearsville had nothing to do with the local bears: it came from German immigrant Christian Baehr, who’d established a post office there in the mid-nineteenth century.)
When he came up to visit the Glasers, Grossman looked over the Striebel property and instantly fell in love with it.** “You know what he paid for that house?” says Ronnie Lyons. “$7,500 down and $150 a month in repayments. He used to brag about that all the time.” While some of his peers in the business expressed surprise at his choice of a second home, those closer to Grossman understood precisely why he’d bought it. “The folk music community would never have gone out to the Hamptons,” says Jonathan Taplin. “If you were going to have a place outside of New York City, the idea of going to what had been an art colony was probably a smart move. It was in keeping with the folk aesthetic, which was very much rooted in this don’t-show-off kind of thing.”
It didn’t hurt that Peter Yarrow had spent much of his life in Woodstock. And when he invited Bob Dylan up to stay at his mother’s cabin, the area made even more sense to Grossman. “Albert had great taste, and he fell in love with the place,” says Arline Cunningham. “I suspect that he wanted a place to hide out with Bob.”
Dylan himself first came to Woodstock with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, whom he had met in late July 1961. She was the politicized daughter of socialist parents, a “red-diaper baby” raised on Guthrie and Seeger songs and by now working for the Congress of Racial Equality. Dylan was besotted with her and inspired by her to write several of his most powerful love songs. She reciprocated, though she took his exotic version of his past with a pinch of salt. The pair were inseparable, snuggling up against the winter cold in his West Fourth Street apartment or hanging out with Yarrow, Dave Van Ronk, and others.
Though Rotolo remembered staying at his mother’s cabin in late May 1963, Peter Yarrow dates it slightly later: “It was the summer of the March on Washington, and I called Bobby and said, ‘Come on up, it’s sweltering in the city.’” Rotolo had been to Woodstock with the Art Students League in the fifties—and met Yarrow there—but this was Dylan’s first trip to the Catskills. “It was a very innocent and joyous time,” Yarrow says. “Bobby fell in love with the place.” While Yarrow and Rotolo took off to go sketching with the League, Dylan remained behind in the cabin, recalled by guitarist Mike Bloomfield as “a little two-room hut . . . isolated out in the woods.” “We would come back with a picture,” Yarrow says, “and Bobby would have written ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game.’ Out of him would spout these extraordinary, earth-shaking songs, but in personal terms he was laughing all the time. ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ feels like the spirit we shared in Woodstock at that time.”
After Dylan appeared at that summer’s Newport Folk Festival—with Yarrow hailing him as “the most important folk artist in America today”—the attention on the young prodigy grew almost exponentially. Where the Folk Revival had been about just that—reviving—The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) transformed folk music into a potent mouthpiece for politicized poetry. Excessive weight was placed on Dylan’s scrawny shoulders. Angry young men and women wanted answers, even if they were blowing in the wind.
Dylan both loved and feared the attention: his new fame was doing strange things to his head. “Even though he intentionally sought success, I don’t think he thought about the side effects,” says Norma Cross. “I don’t think he knew that he wouldn’t be able to walk down the street.” Both in New York and on tour, he was constantly hailed and hassled as a savant and a seer. The more glaring the spotlight, the more of a bolt-hole Woodstock became. “The kids all wanted to crowd around,” says John Byrne Cooke. “There comes a point where if you’re Bob, you think, ‘I want to get out of here.’” Dylan told Robert Shelton that Woodstock was a place where “we stop the clouds, turn time back and inside out, make the sun turn on and off.” He said it was “the greatest, man, the greatest place.”
“Woodstock was a place where you could kind of go and get your thoughts together,” Dylan reflected in 2014. “There were plenty of painters who lived in that area, but very few musicians. We certainly didn’t know anybody up there playing any music. Later there was, but when we were up there [in the] middle sixties, we were pretty much by ourselves.” As intoxicating as New York had been for him, Dylan was a small-town boy at heart and worked better with peace and quiet around him. It helped that Woodstockers didn’t bother him the way people did on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village. Many of the locals didn’t even know who he was, figuring he was just a freaky beatnik from the Art Students League.**
It didn’t take long for Albert Grossman to invite his hottest young artist to stay in Bearsville, less than a mile from the Yarrows’ cabin. Soon Dylan would have his own room in the house, and then the use of one of the property’s cottages. Grossman was busy turning the Striebel house into a shrine to his own taste, complete with the finest furnishings and appurtenances. “He was the first yuppie, really,” says Paul Fishkin. “He was always diddling around in his kitchen with condiments from India that nobody else had. There was the best dried salami hung up, and he was always slicing shit up and offering it to you.”
Helping Grossman spend his nouveaux riches was a Hunter College dropout, thirteen years his junior. Sally Buhler had seen him around the Village as she waited tables at the Café Wha? and the Bitter End. “I had real upward mobility as a waitress,” she joked later, adding that “back then Albert never even said hello to me.” No less ambitious than Grossman, Sally quickly hitched her wagon to his star. They made quite a power couple, both in Manhattan and in Bearsville. “Our life was incredibly intense,” she remembered. “Every night about thirty of us would meet at Albert’s office to go out. The office was constantly packed with people—Peter, Paul, and Mary, of course, but also Ian and Sylvia, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, other musicians, artists, poets.”
Some even thought Buhler was calling the shots behind the scenes. “The way it was told to me,” says her friend Peter Walker, “she was the brains behind the throne, the motivator. She was young; she was brilliant; she was beautiful. And the plan started to unfold. It really was a tremendously successful enterprise.”
IN THE SUMMER of 1963, Dylan’s relationship with Suze Rotolo started to unravel. Discovering he had kept his real name a secret was troubling enough to her; realizing that he was secretive about much else besides was too much—especially after she got pregnant by him. “I believe in his genius,” she wrote in a notebook the following year; “he is an extraordinary writer but I don’t think of him as an honorable person.” She compared him to Picasso in the way he “took no responsibility” in his relationships. Peter Yarrow, who had grown fond of her, began to see Dylan as he really was: “I looked upon him, as I do on most of us, as someone with severe faults and feet of clay.”
Others thought Dylan distraught after Rotolo moved out of 161 West Fourth Street. They noticed how Grossman and Buhler tended to him in Bearsville, feeding him in their well-stocked kitchen. “Bob hadn’t sunk his own roots yet, so being up there was a protection,” says Daniel Kramer, who photographed him in Woodstock and the city in 1964. “It made perfect sense to go and hide out with Albert in the country, because these were the people he could trust.” Still others thought Grossman was feeding Dylan’s incipient paranoia. “Before Albert, he was accessible,” said blues singer-guitarist John Hammond Jr., son of the Columbia executive who’d fallen out with Grossman. Hammond felt that Grossman was deliberately creating “a mystique of exclusiveness” around Dylan, “secluding him away up in Woodstock.”
When Mason Hoffenberg, coauthor of the scandalous soft-porn novel Candy, visited the Bearsville house, he was disappointed to find it so quiet. “I thought I was going to have a ball, because Dylan was real famous then, with girls climbing all over him,” said the man who first met Dylan in Berlin. “But instead of fun, it was grim, like a museum. Dylan was very uptight . . . because he’s not really into balling groupies. Millions of girls were going berserk to get to him and he was doing things like hiding in the closet whenever the door opened.”
“Just as he’d protected Peter, Paul & Mary, Albert protected Bobby,” says Peter Yarrow. “And in terms of Woodstock, that’s where the darker side of his genius enters. Because for all his bravado, Bobby was a very sensitive and delicate entity and needed to be protected. People wanted to get high with him and get busted with him or get into bed with him. Being the object of that kind of fame and pursuit was not a comfortable thing. In Woodstock, Albert partially created this division between the people that were in and the people that were out.”
As his relationship with Rotolo went through its death throes, Dylan set his sights on a new consort. “Somebody got him over to a party in Cambridge where he talked to Joan Baez,” says John Byrne Cooke. “There was a natural connection between Cambridge and Greenwich Village. Dylan and Albert got to know people in our scene, and we got to know people in theirs.” Baez instinctively knew that Dylan’s songs would transform folk music. Meanwhile he was in awe of her “heart-stopping soprano voice” and intricate guitar picking.
In the late summer of 1963, before they sang together at the March on Washington on August 28, Dylan and Baez spent time together in Bearsville. They swam in Grossman’s pool, watched movies, and rode Dylan’s new Triumph motorcycle through the surrounding hills. Though he was a terrible motorcyclist—and an even worse driver of automobiles—he loved to bomb around Woodstock’s back roads. “I have rode alone tho thru the hills on back-roads,” he wrote to Rotolo, “an have discovered all kinds of magic places an great sweepin views.”
Dylan took to riding the Triumph east along Tinker Street to the Café Espresso—“the Depresso,” as local wits referred to it. “He was so relaxed then,” remembered Mary Lou Paturel, who was introduced to Dylan in the café by Tom Paxton. “[He was] smiling, very shy, witty, Chaplinesque. He wasn’t Bob Dylan, he was Bobby Zimmerman.” Fern Malkine, daughter of singer Sonia, remembers Dylan hanging out at the café after his Carnegie Hall concert on October 26, 1963. “He was just a little scruffy guy sitting at a table,” she says. “He was always very nice to me. He’d come in with his dark sunglasses, smoking a lot, and say, ‘Hey girl, heeey,’ And my mother would say, ‘Bob, she’s only fifteen!’” When he came in with Baez, says Malkine, “she seemed very nervous about the relationship, but I didn’t know what was going on or care a lot.” A decade later, Baez’s sweetly pained “Diamonds and Rust” included a lyrical snapshot of Dylan in Woodstock, “standing with brown leaves falling all around and the snow in your hair.”
The Café Espresso, summer 1962 (courtesy of the Paturel family)
According to producer Paul Rothchild, it was in Woodstock in April 1964 that Dylan—in the company of his bodyguard Victor Maymudes and of Rothchild himself—first took LSD. “We drove straight back [from New England] to Albert Grossman’s new house . . . where Dylan had a room at the end of the hall,” Rothchild told Bob Spitz. “When we got there, we discovered that Albert was out of town. Bob started smoking grass, everyone else was higher than a kite and hungry. We all had a serious case of the munchies. Sometime after midnight, Victor was dispatched to the refrigerator, where he found a couple of tabs of acid wrapped in aluminum foil. . . . So we dropped acid on Bob.” For Rothchild, “that was the beginning of the mystical sixties right there.”
Bernard and Mary Lou Paturel’s bistro slowly became Dylan’s home away from home—especially after a stinging Newsweek profile in November 1963 that exposed many of his autobiographical claims as fictions. “As soon as he began to get famous in late ’63, there were a lot of obsessive fans who would come up to him on the street in an almost aggressive way,” says Jonathan Taplin. “Whereas he could hang out at the Espresso and not be bothered. And then of course in Albert’s house he could be incredibly private. Albert had a long driveway and a bunch of ‘No Trespassing’ signs.”
Soon Dylan was spending so much time at the Espresso—drinking coffee, playing chess, reading the New York Times—that the Paturels asked if he wanted to work in the room above it. Painted white with a beamed ceiling, the room measured thirty feet by twenty and had windows that overlooked Tinker Street. It also had a couch and a small desk at which Dylan could write. He gratefully accepted the Paturels’ offer and moved a guitar and a typewriter into the room. “It was supposed to be a secret,” says Billy Faier. “But of course everyone knew it.” Sometimes Dylan even stayed there overnight—Mary Lou Paturel would hear him tapping at the typewriter at three in the morning. “He kind of moved in with us and held a symbolic key to the room,” Bernard told Robert Shelton. “No rent involved, just a mutual understanding that he could stay there whenever he wanted.” Dylan had found another set of surrogate parents.
It was in the White Room that Dylan began to veer away from the topical songs inspired by Rotolo. After The Times They Are A-Changin’, with its anthemic hymn of a title track, he wearied of the role he’d been given by folk’s old guard. New songs like “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “My Back Pages” rejected those who’d loved and supported but also, he felt, restricted him. When these and other inward-looking songs saw the light of day in August 1964, it was on a long-player entitled Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded in a single Beaujolais-fueled night in June. For Suze Rotolo, the album made for tough listening. “Bob sure knew how to maul me,” she wrote. “I felt laid bare and sorry for it.”
DYLAN MAY NEVER have been happier than he was during the summer of 1964. Much of that had to do with feeling ensconced in the bosom of the Paturel family. When Look photographer Douglas Gilbert came to Woodstock in June, he took shots of a smiling Dylan with Bernard, Mary Lou, and their children. He also photographed him at work in the White Room, realizing later that the singer had been typing out liner notes for his new album. John Sebastian, a jug-band singer who’d become a friend of Dylan’s in the Village, visited and ended up in several of Gilbert’s shots.
At a point in Dylan’s career when he was already writing the acerbic songs on Bringing It All Back Home, these endearing images—unseen for forty years—give us a preview of the contented family man to come: still young and boyish, still capable of carefreeness before the whirlwind of notoriety struck. Gilbert’s pictures of Dylan in Grossman’s kitchen with a visiting Allen Ginsberg—one of Dylan’s heroes and now a friend and mentor—tell a similar story. Sitting in on the shots are Sally Buhler, along with Al Aronowitz with his young son Myles. “We all thought he was God,” Aronowitz later said of Dylan, though he also compared him to Billy the Kid.
Dylan by now had his own guest cottage on Grossman’s estate. He could come and go regardless of whether his manager was home or in New York attending to his other artists. He also had a minder and driver in the form of V Maymudes, a sometime actor, poet, and occasional singer who was six years Dylan’s senior. “Victor was a very complex guy and a very talented musician,” says Billy Faier, who had known him on the West Coast. “He played the guitar and wrote some very beautiful songs, but he hid his light under a bushel.” Suze Rotolo found Maymudes “silent and creepy,” and others thought him intimidating; Faier maintains that he was actually very gentle.
David Boyle, who vacated the largest of Grossman’s three cottages for Dylan, had moved up from the city in April 1963 to help Grossman with building and planning permissions. Among the pleasant surprises on offer in his employer’s home were the attentions of the young women there: not only Buhler, but a former roommate of hers from the city. Sara Lownds was the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a Belarusian Jewish scrap-metal dealer; she had been born Shirley Noznisky in Wilmington, Delaware. As a seventeen-year-old she had traumatically found her father’s body after he was shot dead in a hold-up. Later she moved to New York, modeling for Harper’s Bazaar and working as a Playboy Bunny (“Vicky”) before marrying photographer Hans Lownds and changing her name to the more poetic Sara. In October 1961 she gave birth to a daughter, Maria, but became estranged from Lownds, preferring the company of hipper people her own age in Greenwich Village. “Sara was, of course, beautiful,” says Norma Cross, who knew her when she was separating from Lownds. “She had a great style about her, but there was a sadness too.”
With little Maria in tow, Sara moved into Sally Buhler’s West Eighth Street apartment in 1962. “I thought Sally was maybe more interested in women,” says Donn Pennebaker, director of the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back. “She kind of hit it off with [German-born model and singer] Nico, but then she started hanging out with Albert. All the young women were interested in being Playboy Bunnies, because there was a lot of action there. People were trying to get Sally to do it, but she seemed kind of vulnerable. I suspected that Albert was going to be her protector.”
In late 1963, Buhler invited Sara Lownds up to Bearsville. “She was a very beautiful girl,” says Billy Faier, whom Norma Cross introduced to her in Woodstock. “We sat around in Norma’s kitchen for a couple of hours while they did the I Ching, and finally I found myself alone with Sara in her bedroom. We did not get it on, but I spent some nice time with her, and she told me a lot about her marriage to Hans.” Exactly when Bob Dylan first met Sara isn’t clear; her stepson, Peter, thought they’d crossed paths as early as 1962, and that Dylan was the reason her marriage had ended.** But Dylan was still seeing—and regularly performing with—Joan Baez in the summer of 1964. Indeed, the two folk stars spent much of that August together at Bearsville while Grossman and Buhler were traveling in Mexico. Joining them were Baez’s sister Mimi and Mimi’s writer husband, Richard Fariña, who were about to record their first album together as a duo. The four of them drove down to the city for Baez’s August 8 concert at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium—where a soused Dylan sang with her during the second half of the show—but otherwise remained in Bearsville.**
Dick Fariña was working on the novel that became Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, creating a competitive tension with Dylan, who struggled with his own book while also working on songs. If Dylan was the star, the Harvard-educated Fariña had the greater literary cachet. Fariña was meanwhile envious enough of Dylan’s fame to suggest to Mimi they ask Grossman to manage them. Remembering her sister’s rejection of Grossman’s overtures five years earlier, Mimi told Dick she was “not going to sign with that fat pig.” Without even telling her, the ambitious Fariña signed them to Grossman anyway.
In the afternoons, once he’d got enough work done, Dylan took Baez on more motorcycle trips around town and up into the mountains. He was now riding a cherry-red Triumph 350 acquired from Barry Feinstein, a photographer he’d met through Grossman. (Feinstein, the husband of Mary Travers, shot the portrait of a contemptuous-looking Dylan on the cover of The Times They Are A-Changin’.) As they had the previous year, Dylan and Baez often wound up at the Espresso, where the greatest discretion was observed by the Paturels. One night they were at the café with the Fariñas and Peter Yarrow when a behind-closed-doors jam session broke out after dinner. “I played the spoons,” says Daniel Kramer, who had just arrived in town to photograph the Fariñas. “I was so thrilled. It was one of the great nights of my life.”
But all was not entirely well within the Dylan-Baez relationship, and the presence of Sara Lownds in town wasn’t helping matters.
* In Chronicles, Bob Dylan claimed it was he who had told his manager about Woodstock, and had swung by the town with him after a gig at Syracuse University’s Regent Theatre on November 3, 1963. According to Dylan, Grossman “spied a house he liked and bought it there and then.” Then again, you can’t believe everything you read in Chronicles.
* Even so, compared to the surrounding Catskills towns Woodstock was the quintessence of hip. “I don’t know if we were [hip] or not, but we felt that way,” recalled Jeremy Wilber, who grew up in the town in the fifties and early sixties. “While we were watching The Seventh Seal, all the other kids in school were watching Under the Yum Yum Tree with Jack Lemmon.” Wilber and his hip Woodstock pals would joke that people in Shandaken “still ate out of wooden bowls and skinned dogs, and at that time I don’t think it was very far from being true.”
* To the Daily Mirror’s Don Short, in 1969, Dylan mischievously claimed that he and Sara “grew up together as kids in Minnesota” and then “met again in a New York restaurant where [she] was working as a waitress.”
* Another house Dylan and Baez stayed in, according to Bruce Dorfman, was the home of painter Arnold Blanch, “halfway between the Playhouse and the Art Students League.” Dylan was also a regular visitor to the Plochmann Lane home of artist-singer Ed Chavez.