BOB DYLAN WASN’T the only artistic giant to seek sanctuary in the Catskill Mountains in the 1960s. Just as the singer had fled controversy and hysteria by hiding out in Woodstock, so novelist Philip Roth chose to escape the scandal of his best seller Portnoy’s Complaint by moving from Manhattan to Byrdcliffe at the very time when Dylan was making plans to leave it.
“The visibility unnerved me,” Roth said in 2014. “I liked it the old way. And so I moved out to the country.” Woodstock, he recalled, provided “a combination of social seclusion and physical pleasure” while he wrote his novella The Breast and his young girlfriend worked on her dissertation in an adjacent cabin. He added that he’d “never felt more imaginatively polymorphous than when I would put two deck chairs on the lawn at the end of the day and we’d stretch out to enjoy the twilight view of the southern foothills of the Catskills.” Among his closest friends in Woodstock was the painter Philip Guston, who’d made a permanent move to the town two years before. The two Phils took a shared delight in what Guston called “crapola”—in Roth’s words, “billboards, garages, diners, burger joints, junk shops, all the roadside stuff that we occasionally set out to Kingston to enjoy.” Phil the painter and Phil the writer would, Roth said, “drive over to Kingston, have a walk around, take in whatever was hideous, [and] have lunch in my favorite diner the Aim to Please.”
Few of the musicians who’d moved to Woodstock could have expressed themselves as eloquently as the creator of compulsive onanist Alexander Portnoy, yet most would have agreed with Roth about “the twilight view of the southern foothills of the Catskills.” They had left the city in order to breathe clean air, gaze at the mountains, and feel a little more creative than they did in cold-water walk-ups in lower Manhattan. “Things got so rough in the East Village with motorcycle gangs and race wars on my block, it was very scary,” said Artie Traum, who moved to Woodstock in 1968 and became the caretaker at Hi Lo Ha. “So when Bob and Albert and everyone started moving up here, I just felt I had to follow.”
Traum had a direct connection to Dylan and Grossman, but others followed in his tracks simply because they knew Dylan was there. “The image of Woodstock for me was defined primarily by him,” says Danny Goldberg. “It was this sort of magical place in the country that the great genius of our culture had chosen to live in.” Hot on the heels of that knowledge, Goldberg says, Music from Big Pink had “created a mythology of the place as somewhere where musical greatness was comfortable and alternative to the city.”
What many of those now coming into town failed to notice was that the musicians who’d made Woodstock famous as a creative hub were the very ones who were trying to shake people off. “Most of them went there to disappear,” says Milton Glaser, who continued to do design work for Albert Grossman. “Albert came up to disappear too. Every once in a while he used the house to entertain, but mostly he used it to isolate himself.” Recluses such as Dylan liked the fact that, at heart, Woodstock was still a small, blue-collar town in the mountains. And some of the older bohemians had been there for so long that they thought of themselves as natives anyway. “The Byrdcliffe people had faded away, but the artists were still here,” says Graham Blackburn. “And because they’d been here for fifty years, Woodstock was one of those rare places in America where you could walk about with long hair and not get lynched.”
As more musicians and their fans trickled into town, some of the natives grew restless. Cindy Cashdollar grew up in Woodstock with a dad who drove through town muttering curses on the “goddamn hippies” arriving by bus. For Jon Gershen, who moved to Woodstock with a band called the Montgomeries in the spring of 1969, “the people who really managed the town—the supervisor, the fire chief, the guy that had the plumbing business—had gotten used to the quirky element and figured out a way to deal with that. But as the rock folks started to come up here, it was a challenge for them.”
Certain Woodstock landmarks remained impervious to the cultural upheaval. Deanie’s was still the only proper restaurant in town, a place where—of necessity—natives and artists supped together. Deanie Elwyn had been serving unpretentious American food since 1936, opening his eponymous establishment at the corner of Mill Hill Road and Deming Street. When he reopened it in 1960, once again it became the center of the town’s low-key nightlife. “Deanie’s was where Republican attorneys and insurance agents would go,” says Graham Blackburn, “and all the nouveau riche rock ’n’ rollers. If those two groups had met anywhere else in America, it would have been instant antipathy.” Regular patrons of Deanie’s included Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, who often caroused with the very police officers who’d charged them with DUIs. When the Band brought George Harrison to Deanie’s, the house pianist Flo Odell instantly switched to her arrangement of the Beatles’ “Michelle.” “Everyone ran over and told her to shut up,” says Richard Heppner. “They said, ‘You’ll get him mad and he’ll leave!’”
Woodstock had long been a sort of staging post between Greenwich Village and the Great American Wilderness. “Some people really took things seriously and went to communes in Vermont,” says Robbie Dupree, who relocated from Brooklyn. “We urbanites weren’t really up for that. We wanted to be some place where you could get a New York Times and a bagel.” Yet Dupree acknowledges the impact that Stewart Brand’s book The Whole Earth Catalog had in fostering a new back-to-the-land consciousness in Woodstock, whose very name seemed to encourage pastoral retreat. (“We like that name, it has a familiar ring to it,” Dylan told Al Aronowitz. “That’s one of the reasons we moved up here.”) The Catalog, says Dupree, was “the bible of dropping out and getting out of the city. . . . People who came to Woodstock started dressing down and putting their TVs in the closet.”
Courtesy of the Woodstock Historical Society
Charles Reich’s 1970 bestseller The Greening of America took things even further, blending sociology with celebrations of marijuana and denim. Village Voice pop critic Richard Goldstein had a college friend who was “tilling the land in the Catskill Mountains” and for whom—in Goldstein’s words—“leaving the city was the only way to maintain the hippie ideal against the urban corruptions of commerce and chic.” Communes sprung up around Woodstock, one blessed with the name True Light Beavers, who in June 1969 bought a small property in Willow and expanded to include a number of families that grew their own food and even founded a free school. Another newcomer was Alan Gordon, who moved to Woodstock from Haight-Ashbury and later founded the monthly Woodstock Aquarian. In its inaugural issue he described Woodstock as “a town but more a name that symbolizes a state of consciousness . . . a Mecca for the culture of the new age.”
“I can’t say that Dylan was the sole attraction for me coming here,” Gordon later told Elliott Landy, “but it was symbolic of what the place represented. I was very much into his poetry and so forth, and having had my own vision of whatever you want to call it—spirituality, God—I felt I was being swept along in something.” Similarly swept along was Michael Lang, whom Gordon had known in Florida. “[Michael] had . . . a place there called the Head Shop,” Gordon recalled. “I told him I was coming up here to live and he said he was coming here also. We agreed that we would meet up here . . . and we kind of hit it off fairly decently with each other.”
Lang, who arrived in Woodstock in the early spring of 1968, recalls “a whole Coconut Grove contingent” that relocated there in the late sixties. Among them was folk singer Fred Neil, who’d been one of Dylan’s first points of contact in Greenwich Village and whose velvety baritone had influenced singers from Tim Buckley to David Crosby. “Fred was someone who was talked about with great reverence,” says Procol Harum’s Keith Reid. “I don’t know that I’d even heard his records, but people spoke about him all the time.” Neil was a recluse who’d struggled with drugs before finding redemption in his passion for dolphins. There weren’t many of those in Woodstock, but Neil found the town healthier than Manhattan after he moved into a cabin built for him by his manager Howard Solomon.
“The cabin was off Route 212 past Glasco Turnpike, near Big Pink,” says Lang, who took over Neil’s management from Solomon. “Freddie was in good shape, though he didn’t want to work.” Jeremy Wilber, who returned to his native Woodstock in the summer of 1968, says that “once in a while, after about his twelfth or fifteenth Irish coffee,” Neil would “belt one out in the Sled Hill Café, but it was very, very rare.” He did, however, submit to the recording of the first side of his 1971 album The Other Side of This Life at Woodstock’s Elephant club, with guitarist Monte Dunn backing him on loose, convivial versions of “The Dolphins” and “Everybody’s Talkin’” (the song that took Harry Nilsson to number 2 after John Schlesinger used it in his 1969 hit film Midnight Cowboy).
Two other hard-drug users from the Village folk scene, Tim Hardin and Karen Dalton, based themselves at least part-time in Woodstock in an effort to steer clear of narcotic temptation. Peter Walker even remembers them singing together in Fred Neil’s cabin. “Tim was trying to get past his habit so he could be the man he wanted to be,” says Harvey Brooks, who played on sessions with the three singers. “I think they all found Woodstock to be a place where they could stare up at the mountains contemplating how things could be or should be.” Not that it proved easy to avoid heroin in Woodstock, since the drug had followed the music up to the Catskills. “There was an epidemic of it here from 1967 till about 1970,” says Jeremy Wilber. “The town was just awash in it. Some of my friends got caught up in it. Most of them, thankfully, survived.”
Hardin, who had moved into a house on Zena Highwoods Road, at least moderated his drug use there. “The house is a beautiful country home, [with] real logs,” he told Hullabaloo magazine, though he added that he didn’t “get along very good” with fellow Woodstock import Bob Dylan.** “I don’t think it would have been hard for Tim to get drugs anywhere,” says Michael Lang. “But moving up here might have taken him out of that environment.”
ONE OF HARDIN’S local performances was at the first Sound-Out, a small music festival held near Fred Neil’s cabin. Although it was in Saugerties, the festival was known from the start as the Woodstock Sound-Out—and retained that name till the following year, when it became simply the Woodstock Sound Festival. “Tim would regularly show up at these outdoor events,” says Jeremy Wilber, “and he’d get up on the stage and keel over from too much heroin.”
For most of the few hundred spectators, the first Sound-Out—held on Labor Day 1967—was not an especially druggy affair. Rather, it was an idyllic gathering of hippies who’d moved into the area, grooving to music by Richie Havens, Phil Ochs, and Billy Batson. “Richie was the first major artist to play there,” says Dean Schambach, who built a low stage for the concert. “On a beautiful starry night there were people with Volkswagen buses, and they built fires and cooked chicken. And Mike Lang saw this.”
Lang himself confirms that “being out in nature, smoking a joint and not being hassled and listening to these wonderful artists was the blueprint for the elements that needed to come together.” For him, the owner of the land where the Sound-Outs were staged was herself a force of nature. “She was a wily old girl,” Fern Malkine says of Pansy Drake “Pan” Copeland. “She had things going on all over the place, including an art gallery in town.” Though her day job was running Ann’s Delicatessen on Tinker Street, the fifty-seven-year-old Copeland loved artists and musicians, providing them with cheap accommodation in a quasi-communal property known as the Peter Pan Farm. “What is now the Woodstock Day School was the Farm,” says Lynne Naso, then the girlfriend of Paul Butterfield’s drummer Philip Wilson. “Pan had three or four little houses, and lots of musicians lived there.” Among them were the band Chango, members of Butterfield’s group, and singer-songwriter Tim Moore. “It was this farmstead kind of thing, and you can imagine what went on out there,” says Robbie Dupree. “There was a sort of teepee sauna that was always filled with naked girls.” Another of the Peter Pan musicians was Jim Weider. “It was a whole scene,” he says. “The artist Peter Max was in the front room, and there was a place where you could practice and a few little apartments where Butterfield’s guys lived.”
Weider was well placed, therefore, to catch the Sound-Outs, whose free-spirited promoter John “Jocko” Moffitt booked acts such as the Lower East Side band Cat Mother & the All Night News Boys, themselves residents of the Farm. Other groups included the Bronx-reared Blues Magoos, who’d had a top 5 hit with “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet”; the Boston-based Colwell-Winfield Blues Band; Jerry Moore’s hippie-gospel troupe the Children of God; and powerful blues-rockers Fear Itself, fronted by Southern singer Ellen McIlwaine. “Ellen had this voice that could bring down the house,” says Fern Malkine. “And while she was singing, there was this strobe light. None of us had ever seen one before.”
On the folkier side were Peter Walker, Happy & Artie Traum, Don McLean, Jerry Jeff Walker, and a young James Taylor. Even England’s Soft Machine and Incredible String Band played the festival. MC for the shows was usually Bob Fass, host of WBAI’s Radio Unnameable in New York. Julius Bruggeman, who took over the booking of the Sound Festivals after Jocko Moffitt fell out with Pan Copeland, recalled that Bob Dylan, Albert Grossman, and Jimi Hendrix were among the backstage visitors. And that’s without even mentioning the mind-expanding goulash.
THANKS TO THE Sound-Outs but mainly because of Dylan and Music from Big Pink, musicians were showing up in Woodstock in ever-greater numbers. In the groovy parlance of the times, they wanted to “get it together in the country.” On the West Coast, Canned Heat was “Going Up the Country” in its big 1968 hit, while Taj Mahal was “Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue.” The hippie exodus from cities was in full swing.
“We’d heard that Woodstock was a place where you could work on your material and find your voice,” says Jon Gershen. “It was very cheap, and there weren’t a lot of distractions.” With his fellow Montgomeries—his brother David and bass player Tony Brown—Gershen found a bright yellow house off Route 212 in Shady. Turning a parlor room into a rehearsal space, the band set about writing the songs they hoped would get them a record deal. Before long they’d bonded with other aspiring musicians who’d come to town. “There was this sense of Woodstock being a cloistered village with the mountains around you,” Gershen says. “And because you felt kind of boxed in, you got to know other musicians. Someone would say, ‘I’m a singer.’ And you’d say, ‘Well, come on over.’” Nearly all the musicians frequented a coin-operated Laundromat in what was known as the Bearsville Flats. “It was run by Sam the Laundromat Man,” says Gershen. “He’d had a tracheotomy and had a hole in his throat that he smoked through. You’d run into Garth Hudson there. You’d run into everyone there except Dylan.”
Gershen noticed that most of the musicians came from urban backgrounds, which initially exacerbated the animosity of the locals. Yet as the newcomers settled into the small-town, backwoods lifestyle, slowly they were accepted. “You pretty quickly started to have a love affair with the place,” Gershen says. “We would go and get our state fishing licenses so that we could go down to the Ashokan Reservoir and fish. When people ponder how all of a sudden Dylan went from the wild maniac to the serene family man, you have to know that when you moved up to Woodstock, the place was a powerful force.”
“It was a sort of back-to-the-farm thing that seemed attractive to people who wanted to get out of the rat-infested rehearsal rooms,” says Mark McKenna, who came to Woodstock in 1968 to meet Fear Itself. “Chris Zaloom [Fear Itself’s guitarist] was living in a cold-water flat on the Bowery—it was like Dresden! So it was a no-brainer for these guys to say, ‘Let’s get out of here and go where there’s grass and trees and no rats or roaches!’” Another musician who wound up in town was a drummer with the splendidly hippiefied name Daoud Elias Shaar. “Every weekend, half the people in the East Village would get on buses and go to Woodstock,” says the man now known more economically as plain Daoud Shaw. “And they would sleep anywhere: in the woods, crashing at somebody’s house.” Shaw had joined a New York art-rock band called Chrysalis, which made an underpromoted album for MGM Records and then had the same bright idea that everyone was having. “It was, ‘Let’s get out of New York City,’” he says. “It was, ‘We’ll get a house together, and we’ll rehearse in the living room.’ And that’s exactly what we did.” Featuring singer Nancy Nairn and guitarist/writer J. Spider Barbour, Chrysalis was one of the first amplified groups to play regularly at the Café Espresso, which the Paturels had sold. “It had a crummy p.a. system, but there was a drinking crowd that seemed to like good music,” says Shaw. “And there were always people sitting in—sometimes people who shouldn’t have been sitting in.”
Tim Hardin was another regular at the Espresso, often wreaking minor havoc there. One night he was at the piano when David Boyle asked why he couldn’t play “something nice like ‘Misty Roses.’” Fuming, Hardin reached to grab hold of a chainsaw that Boyle had with him. Boyle stood his ground. “You can ask my girlfriend if she wants to dance,” he said, “but you can’t touch my chainsaw.” Another local legend has a smacked-out Hardin nodding out in his car in the depths of a Woodstock winter and being entombed by a heavy snowfall. To Jeremy Wilber, Hardin was “one of those people born with an overwhelming burden of unrelievable pain.” When Wilber visited the singer’s house with Sonia Malkine’s guitarist son, Gilles, it was “a very subdued scene.”
The house in question provided the location for one of the stranger recordings of the late 1960s. The mouthful of a title alone (Suite for Susan Moore and Damion—We Are—One, One, All in One) had the Columbia executives scratching their heads. But it was the experiment of the recording itself that made one wonder who could possibly have green-lit such a project. The house was literally wired for sound by engineer Don Puluse, with cables running through to a console and board in the nursery. Hardin had stipulated that tape should run 24/7 to capture every stray moment of inspiration. “This was the mothership of originality,” says the album’s producer Gary Klein. “Don couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘Gary, this is going to be some ride.’ It was a project that was the first of its kind and maybe the last of its kind.”
Holding the chaos together was Susan Moore herself—or more accurately, Morss—the mother of Tim’s son Damion. She made tea and baked cakes for Klein, Puluse, and a smattering of musicians from Paul Butterfield’s new band: guitarist Buzzy Feiten, trumpeter Keith Johnson, alto saxophonist David Sanborn, and drummer Philip Wilson. Butterfield himself played harmonica on “Last Sweet Moments.” “They were in a good place,” Klein says of Hardin and Morss. “Tim was kissing Susan and grabbing her in front of everyone. He loved showing his affection. He loved playing with his kid when he wasn’t recording.” But things can’t have been quite as happy as they seemed. A mere two weeks after tying the knot with Hardin in a small private ceremony, Morss—to whom the whole meandering opus had been an extended poetic hymn—took baby Damion and split.
“It’s a very impressionistic recording,” Gary Klein says of Suite for Susan Moore. “It’s just out there, and they paid a lot of money for it. I’m surprised they even released it, to tell you the truth.” Even Hardin fan Will Sheff of Okkervill River struggled with the album, writing in 2005 that “its sadness comes not from contemplation or from clear-eyed and hard-won wisdom but from how empty Hardin’s pronouncements on romantic commitment and fatherly love ring.”
Another local musician who played on the album was keyboard player Warren Bernhardt, who’d gigged with Hardin in New York and followed him up to Woodstock in late 1968. “Tim called me the Minister of Joy,” he remembers. “When he was on, he was the best singer I ever heard in my life. But the Suite recording was pretty haphazard. There was a lot of sitting around and waiting. Tim had a couple of gofers: Michael Lang was one of them. It was, ‘Mike, go get us some cheeseburgers and coffee.’” Bernhardt was playing the Espresso on the night Hardin wandered off to find a fingerpick and didn’t return for three hours. “But everybody stayed,” he says. “And when he got back, we did a long, long set till about five in the morning. It was like going to see Charlie Parker: you just had to wait till he showed up.”
Hardin was also a regular at the Sled Hill Café, a funky dive at the intersection of Deming Street and Sled Hill Road opened by Buddy Sife in 1964.** A notorious local known as “Crazy” Wayne Ambrosio was in his cups one night at the Sled Hill when Hardin sauntered past to retrieve his guitar from the storeroom. “There goes Tim Hard-On,” Ambrosio muttered, to which Hardin responded by returning with the guitar and lifting it high over Crazy Wayne’s head. “I happened to be standing behind Tim at that moment,” says Jeremy Wilber, one of Sife’s bartenders. “I grabbed the body of the guitar so that he couldn’t kill Wayne. I’m pretty sure I kept him out of jail.”
Courtesy of the Woodstock Historical Society
By early 1969, the Sled Hill, a former lumber shed, was the main hangout for Woodstock’s musical in-crowd, the place where the more bibulous stars would show up in the small hours. “If you played a serious gig, that was at the Espresso,” says Graham Blackburn, “but the Sled Hill was the main meeting place.” Even Dylan came by. “He wouldn’t come to play,” says Jeremy Wilber, “but when the guitars were passed around after-hours he’d say, ‘Hey, I know a tune.’ And Bobby Neuwirth would pick up a guitar and sing back, and then Levon would sing something else. That was not unusual.”
Less of a hangout per se was the Elephant. Seizing on Woodstock’s status as a bucolic outpost of Greenwich Village, Gaslight Café manager Sam Hood converted the former home of the S.S. Sea Horse into a properly functioning club where folk singers and blues men played over summer weekends. “A lot of live venues in Woodstock were kind of ad hoc affairs,” says Jon Gershen. “Sam was the first guy who’d actually owned and managed a big-city club. He put a lot of money into the Elephant, and that made people take notice. He was able to bring in a lot of well-known performers. I remember a riveting show by Doc and Merle Watson. Everyone turned up for that one, including all five guys from the Band.”
By the early summer of 1969, the Elephant and the Espresso were packed almost every weekend. Just a year earlier, Larry Packer of Cat Mother & the All Night News Boys had strolled down Rock City Road with a fellow musician. “The guy said to me, ‘You watch, one day this town will be like Provincetown,’” Packer says. “I said, ‘Come on, you’re crazy.’ But he was right.”
* That didn’t stop Dylan recording Hardin’s best-known song, “If I Were a Carpenter,” with the Hawks. Though it may not have been taped at Big Pink, it was included on The Basement Tapes Complete.
* Between 1967 and 1968, the Sled Hill had a brief makeover as a macrobiotic restaurant called the Paradox.