SUCH WAS WOODSTOCK’S almost mystical appeal that other British musicians followed in George Harrison’s tracks, making pilgrimages to the town to see what the fuss was about. “We were getting input from people who came to visit us,” says Happy Traum. “The Incredible String Band came and spent a bunch of time here because their manager, Joe Boyd, was friends with Jim Rooney and Geoff and Maria Muldaur from the Cambridge days.”
Through Boyd came another folk act from across the water. John and Beverley Martyn had met just a few months before Boyd brought them to New York. Shortly after tying the knot in April 1969, the couple flew to America with Beverley’s baby daughter to work on an album for Island Records. Escaping the infernal humidity of Manhattan, they took a bus up to Woodstock, where Boyd had rented them a house—recently vacated by the Traums—on Lower Byrdcliffe Road. To their surprise they learned that their friend Jackson C. Frank was living in town with model Elaine Sedgwick and their newborn son. It turned out Frank had spent time there the previous year: he’d even edited a newspaper called the Woodstock Week and helped Pan Copeland with the Woodstock Sound festival. But it was clear that all was not well with the feted composer of “Blues Run the Game,” who as a boy had survived the horrifying trauma of a school fire in his native Buffalo. “He wasn’t right and he would do strange things,” says Beverley. “He turned up one afternoon with an axe and confronted John saying, ‘It should have been me.’ There was a jealous thing going on, like he should have been making an album for Island.”**
There were idyllic moments with Frank nonetheless. He drove the Martyns up to Palenville, where John floated down Kaaterskill Creek in a rubber tire and Beverley fantasized about living the hippie life in the Catskills wilderness. John so fell in love with the area that he wrote a winsome song—called simply “Woodstock”—in the town’s honor, complete with lyrics such as “Butterflies flutter by, everybody’s apple pie / Even the man next door can sing.” “I thought it was rather naïve,” confesses Beverley, “especially since right next door to us was a Mafia family that was straight out of The Sopranos.” Another neighbor turned out be Pamela Feeley, childhood sweetheart of Lee Marvin, who’d recently returned from Hollywood to marry her. “She took me to meet Lee,” says Beverley. “She was a great woman. She wasn’t all nail-varnish and blow-dried hair.”††
Though the album that Joe Boyd had brought the couple over to record was supposed to be a solo release by Beverley, her husband slowly took control of the project. To her alarm, the half-Scottish charmer with the face of a Renaissance angel was morphing into an insecure, controlling alcoholic. Not wanting to upset him, she played along. Rehearsals for the recording sessions took place in the Lower Byrdcliffe Road house, where they were joined by keyboard player Paul Harris and by Harvey Brooks and Levon Helm, the rhythm section for Dylan’s 1965 shows at Forest Hills and the Hollywood Bowl.** “Paul came up from the city with his wife,” says Beverley. “They had a little log cabin there, like a lot of people did. Harvey also came up, bringing bagels and smoked salmon that he kept in our fridge.” The album itself, Stormbringer!, was recorded at New York’s A&R studios, with additional contributions from John Simon and drummers Billy Mundi and Herbie Lovelle. John Martyn wound up with six songwriting credits to his wife’s four.
When the couple were invited by Happy Traum to perform at a Fourth of July charity concert at the Woodstock Playhouse—benefiting Pete Seeger’s Clearwater Project to clean up the Hudson River—John told Beverley it would be better if she didn’t sing. “He didn’t want me to be seen because he thought I outshone him onstage,” she later wrote. “I said, ‘Let me do one song,’ which was Lonnie Johnson’s ‘Jelly Roll Baker.’ As I came on, there were wolf whistles, which upset him. Then I started to sing, and you could have cut the air with a knife. I was wailing away, and then I finished the song and walked off to rapturous applause.”
Afterwards, Beverley noticed Bob Dylan entering the Playhouse foyer. “Tiny and gazelle-like he wore a black frock coat and a white shirt,” she later wrote. “He looked like a yeshiva boy in his gold spectacles, a student of the Talmud.” A Sephardic Jewish beauty, Beverley was just Dylan’s type, so it was no surprise when he made a beeline for her. Seeing them together, John crossed the room rapidly and pulled her away from him. “Don’t hurt her, man,” Dylan remonstrated. “She’s only saying hello.” Back on Lower Byrdcliffe Road, Beverley learned the terrifying truth about the abusive boy who’d been abandoned by his mother and was unable to trust women. “He started shouting and throwing things at me, including a fork that hit me under the eye,” she says. “I thought he had gone mad. I had no idea he was capable of this sort of violence.” Martyn then burst into tears and threw himself at her feet, begging forgiveness and beginning a cycle of marital abuse that would last for another decade.**
DYLAN HIMSELF WAS now living with Sara and their children in a large house on Ohayo Mountain Road. Once the home of Progressive Movement leader Walter Weyl (1873–1919), it sat at the end of a long driveway and had gates that deterred the sort of fan who—in Jeremy Wilber’s words—got off the bus and said, “Where’s Bob? I have to tell him something.” Moreover, Dylan had recently released Nashville Skyline, an album of plangent country songs that perplexed fans and critics even more than John Wesley Harding had done. “The intelligentsia of the folk and rock world were very confused by it,” says Michael Friedman, who had just begun working for Albert Grossman in New York. “But Dylan was always ready to surprise the world with every move he made. Albert didn’t like that album either.”
At least on the new album there weren’t any veiled attacks on Grossman. Instead Dylan presented a new musical persona—complete with an unrecognizably plummy voice—that was so completely at odds with the counterculture it felt like an attack on it. Either that, or Nashville Skyline was exactly what it purported to be: a work of artless country comfort, picking up from where the last two Harding songs had left off. For its few lyrics of loss—the opening duet with Johnny Cash (“Girl from the North Country”), the green-eyed “Tell Me That It Isn’t True,” the resignedly lovely “I Threw It All Away”—there were many more of backwater bonhomie and desire. “In many ways [it] achieves the artistically impossible,” Dylan’s old Minnesota acquaintance Paul Nelson wrote: “a deep, humane and interesting statement about being happy.”
Was Dylan happy? Or was Nashville Skyline a canny attempt to throw people off the scent, Dylan aligning himself with the music of conservative rednecks? Certainly his hatred of hippies had increased with each trespass on Hi Lo Ha. “I wanted to set fire to these people,” he wrote nastily in Chronicles. But then he also had a pointed dig at Robbie Robertson for asking where he planned to “take” the music scene. His stance was this: people were welcome to their fantasies about him, but the only fantasy he had was of a normal life for his young family. And for a period the twelve-bedroom Weyl mansion, set in thirty-nine acres, offered something like the white-picket-fence existence he craved. It gave him a northerly view of Overlook Mountain and boasted huge rooms in which his children could run wild—along with the “big brass bed” of Nashville Skyline’s big hit “Lay, Lady, Lay.”
“It was just very homey,” says Maria Muldaur, who took her four-year-old daughter, Jenni, over for play dates. “Lots of rugrats crawling around on the floor playing with toys. The plates didn’t match, and it was very much like I would have had it.” In Chronicles, Dylan wrote that he “went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible . . . the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing.” When in 1973 he came to record his rapturous hymn to his children, “Forever Young,” Dylan told Planet Waves engineer Rob Fraboni that he’d been “carrying this song around in my head for five years.”
When George Harrison came for another visit in the summer, Dylan was considerably more relaxed than he’d been on the Beatle’s previous visit. “He and George and Artie and I spent about three hours just playing folk songs,” says Happy Traum. “It didn’t even occur to me to bring a camera. It was a passing thing, like a feather in the wind.” At night, Dylan would make a call to Woodstock’s Millstream Inn and ask owner Mitchell Rapaport to make him a pizza, which he would then eat in the Inn’s kitchen.** “There was a lot of time spent walking around the pool,” Bruce Dorfman recalls of visits to the new house. “Bob used to clean it and clean it and clean it. I think the Ohayo Mountain Road experience was something other than Byrdcliffe had been for him. He was able to figure out a way of delivering a persona that worked, and I don’t entirely blame him for that.”
“He was sort of remote,” says Dean Schambach, who posed with Dylan and David Boyle for photographs that Elliott Landy took on the steps of the Woodstock Bakery on the village green.** “To a great extent there was a cold defensive mechanism there: ‘I’m insulating myself slightly. Please forgive me, but I need to do this.’ And we understood that.” Boyle, however, claims Dylan stole the sprinkles off the bakery’s doughnuts when people weren’t looking. “Bobby,” he says, “was a rather dirty old dishrag who treated people like shit. . . . He was never a happy family man.”
WHILE DYLAN KEPT his adopted hometown at arm’s length, Woodstock’s music scene flourished, not only in its clubs and bars but in the homes and cabins where musicians jammed and collaborated. “The whole thing was growing,” says Happy Traum. “People would suddenly turn up in town. You could see anybody on the streets of Woodstock.”
“It was a rarefied and fertile time for music,” says Robbie Dupree. “There was an understanding and a tolerance for it all that you wouldn’t have found twenty minutes away. We had interracial couples, which doesn’t seem like anything today, but back then it was a big deal in rural America. So this was a refuge for people with different lifestyles.” The town was, above all, loose. “It was an oasis, but it wasn’t like people were screamingly freaked-out,” says Graham Blackburn. “To us it was more normal than living in the city and wearing a hat and smoking a Panatella and going to work in an ad agency.”
For others, though, Woodstock’s golden age was already over: the days when Dylan could sit undisturbed at the Espresso were gone. “It seems to me it went fairly quickly from being the hippest place you could go to almost Touristville,” says John Niven, whose 2005 novella Music from Big Pink is an uncanny portrait of late sixties Woodstock. “It was already becoming a caricature of what it had been. A lot of the people were quite troubled, so there was this notion that ‘If I put myself in some kind of bucolic surrounding, things will get better.’ But changing your locale doesn’t change what’s going on inside you.”
For those who went further back than Dylan, the dream of Woodstock as an artistic oasis had indubitably passed. “The town I knew, and that I’d grown up in, ceased to be,” says Peter Yarrow. “There was a real shift. It became about celebrity as well as about the art. And unfortunately there were elements of this celebrity that created a very unsavory hierarchy, whereby some people were ‘in’ and some were not. To my mind, that division was unhealthy and not loving. In retrospect, the simple goodness of Woodstock at that point was gone.”
* The death of his son from cystic fibrosis would push Frank into a deep depression and eventually into severe mental illness. “He proceeded to fall apart before our very eyes,” remembered singer Al Stewart, a friend from the London folk days. His decline inspired Sandy Denny’s painfully beautiful song “Next Time Around.” In Woodstock there were rumors about him screwing up an audition for Albert Grossman that might have turned his career around. In the late seventies he lived briefly in the Broadview Road cabin where Bob Dylan had first stayed in 1963. After a period spent homeless on the streets of New York, where he’d gone in search of help from his old friend Paul Simon, he lived his last years in sheltered accommodation in Woodstock. “The last time I saw him,” said Tom Paxton, “. . . he was in terrible condition, drunk and minus an eye.” Frank died in March 1999.
† Feeley’s father was old-school Woodstock and no admirer of rock stars. When he heard a jam session taking place in a neighboring house rented by songwriters John and JoHanna Hall, he came over and threatened to call the cops. “Clearly he thought there was an orgy going on,” says JoHanna. “With people like that it was very much like, ‘Go back to New York where you came from!’”
* Many years later, John Martyn was reunited with Helm on a duet version of “Rock Salt and Nails.” According to Beverley, Helm told him, “I don’t remember you too well, but your wife had a fine pair o’ torpedoes on her!”
* Though he never returned to Woodstock, it may have been more than coincidence that—almost thirty years later—John Martyn recorded Bobby Charles’s Woodstock songs “Small Town Talk” and “He’s Got All the Whiskey” on his 1998 album The Church with One Bell.
* The following year Bernard Paturel, who had worked as Dylan’s driver after selling the Espresso, opened a pizza place on Tinker Street near Bearsville. He called it Country Pie after the song on Nashville Skyline. The Dylans occasionally ate there with their children.
* The shots with Boyle and Schambach were Dylan’s own original idea for the Nashville Skyline album cover. After he saw them, he rejected them.