WOODSTOCK WOULD NOT be complete without an Artist Road, though technically the cul-de-sac of that name is in Saugerties. In the early summer of 1971, Paul and Kathy Butterfield were living at the end of it, while Amos Garrett rented a small cottage closer to Route 212. Across the way from Garrett, in a larger single-story house, lived Jim Colegrove and N. D. Smart II, the rhythm section that, until lately, had played with Garrett in Great Speckled Bird.
With their lease up for renewal in July, Colegrove and Smart agreed to allow viewings of the property while they made up their minds about whether to stay. One day there was a knock at the door. A local realtor stood there with two men who clearly were not employees of IBM or Rotron. Both wore beards and longish hair, and one wore bib overalls without a shirt. Out in their car was a shaggy-haired golden retriever named Willie. As they strolled about the house, the guy in the overalls was heard to say, in an unmistakably Southern accent, “Ah see y’all are musicians.” When Colegrove requested his name, the man said it was Bobby Charles Guidry. Colegrove did a double take. “You mean Bobby Charles, the guy that recorded for Chess and Imperial?” Guidry nodded. “Don’t tell anybody,” he said.** What were these swampy characters, grizzly men out of Deliverance, doing at large in a Yankee arts town? How had Charles, author of the timeless “See You Later, Alligator” and “Walking to New Orleans,” fetched up in the Catskill Mountains, fifteen hundred miles from the bayous of Louisiana?
It transpired that Charles was on the run from the law in Nashville, where he’d worked as a writer for hire in the stable of WLAC DJ John “R” Richbourg. With a drug charge hanging over him—a neighbor had, he said, stashed some speed in his apartment—he’d fled town and hidden out in Texas and the Southwest. “You learn to live with the underground, you know, with the street people,” he said in 1995. When things got too hot in Austin, someone told Charles about a safe house in upstate New York. He commandeered Shehorn and told him to point his car north. For a while the two men holed up like fugitives in the tiny Sullivan County village of Jeffersonville, later described by Patty Hearst—who was held there after her kidnapping—as “remote and near nowhere in particular.”
“One morning I was at the Laundromat,” Charles recalled. “I had long hair, looked like a clump of shit in a piece of snow, sticking out real bad, and these old ladies there were looking at me and saying, ‘Well, I’m sure glad we got all these state troopers living in this town.’ And I ran out of there and got [Shehorn] and said, ‘Man this is a cop town, I’m getting my ass outta here.’” Charles claimed he’d never heard of Woodstock and didn’t even associate the name with the world-famous festival that had taken place only a few miles from Jeffersonville.
Colegrove is skeptical about the claim and thinks someone had tipped off the Cajun songwriter that Albert Grossman might be able to get him out of his Nashville jam. If that was true, Charles played it cool and wormed his way slowly into Grossman’s inner sanctum. Having found a house out in Wittenberg, he and Shehorn took to visiting Artist Road and hanging with Colegrove and Smart, who soon introduced their legendary new acquaintance to their Woodstock peer group. “One afternoon, Colegrove and N.D. showed up at the studio with another fellow in tow,” Jim Rooney wrote. “He had . . . a weathered look—a little like Jesus. He had a beautiful smile and a lovely soft way of speaking, very laid-back. After work that night a few of us wound up over at Bill Keith’s with Bobby. In the course of the evening he picked up a guitar and sang us a song.”
The song was “Tennessee Blues,” which Bobby had written in Jeffersonville as an expression of his yearning to leave his troubles behind him. Like the others gathered at Keith’s place, Rooney was floored: “It entered my heart and stayed forever,” he would write years later. Others have been just as affected by the song’s dreamy melancholy. “We once did a cover of it,” says Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue. “I took it as my own, as something I would have written about the Catskills. And then a friend told me it was written here. I began to see the thread that runs through the place and was able to connect myself to it. It hit me like a ton of bricks.”
Word soon leaked through to the Band that Charles was in town. From there it was only a matter of time before the whisperings reached the ears of their manager. “Woodstock was a very stratified community,” says Paula Batson, then waitressing at the Bear. “But when somebody like Bobby came to town, he was just so immensely talented and such a wonderful character that he acquired a special kind of status.”
Along with Rick Danko, Maria Muldaur was at Grossman’s house the night Charles came by to sing some of his songs. “She’s such a free spirit,” Charles remembered. “We started singing some songs together, and Albert liked it. He just sat there with this fingers crossed, twiddling his thumbs, like dollar signs were going through his mind.” Though he hadn’t performed live since scoring mid-fifties R&B hits with “Alligator” and “Time Will Tell,” Charles had a voice as rich and soft as molasses, a little like Danko’s. And if Danko thought Charles was cool, that was good enough for Grossman, who soon assured the Louisianan that he could get the drug charges dropped. “Albert said he would get me out of my problem if I would sign a contract with him,” Charles recalled. “He guaranteed me that I would be making all kinds of money and all that bullshit, you know.” After Grossman got Mo Ostin and Joe Smith at Warner-Reprise to vouch for Charles’s character and commercial prospects, the singer was put on a five-year probation order in New York state. “Albert was the guru,” Charles said. “He carried a big stick. If Albert said yes everything was fine. If Albert said no you had a big problem.”
Fittingly it was Rick Danko who expressed the most interest in collaborating with Charles when Grossman green-lit some demo recordings at Bearsville in November 1971. “They became the fastest of friends,” says Jonathan Taplin. “Levon loved Bobby too, but Rick was up for any party, any time, anywhere.” To Paula Batson, who watched Danko and Charles drinking at the Bear—often with Paul Butterfield in tow—Danko was “the member of the Band that people knew, the one who was more out there and friendly to anybody.” Charles was equally sweet-natured, though the company of Butterfield often got him into trouble around town. “I actually had a fight with Bobby,” says Robbie Dupree, whose band the Striders was then making waves in Woodstock. “We were in the Espresso one night, and my bass player, Greg Jackson, was awestruck. He told Butterfield he’d seen him play in Central Park but said the sound man hadn’t done a good job. And for that he got a smack right in the face. So I grabbed Butterfield’s hand and Bobby grabbed me, and then we went at it. They were drunk and liked to think of themselves as tough guys, so I said, ‘Go to Kingston—there’s a whole town to fight down there!’”
Despite the scrap, Dupree felt a sneaking admiration for these “tough guys,” who seemed to model themselves on local icon Lee Marvin. “They were real men,” he says. “And that was really prevalent in the Bearsville scheme of things: Butterfield and Bobby Charles and the Band guys. They were all hard-drinking everymen, and that was why they liked Lee so much. It was a blue-collar vibration that was happening. They were not to be trifled with.”
Less of a real man, and more of a baby-faced crazy man, was actor Michael J. Pollard, who also took up with Charles in Woodstock. “He used to follow me around the house,” Charles remembered. “Man, he was really out there. He lived in a balloon, he lived in his own world.” When Jim and Sheila Moony Rooney hosted a party for Charles’s thirty-fourth birthday in February 1972, Pollard staggered into their house on Sickler Road with Bobby Neuwirth. “Someone brought Fred Neil along,” Rooney recalled. “Here he was in our living room opening his guitar case, getting ready to sing Bobby a song. Suddenly I heard a crash in the kitchen.” Pollard had upended a wicker planter, strewing broken pots and soil all over the floor. “Sheila came over to him and boxed his ears,” wrote Rooney, who threw the actor out in the snow. “As I turned around, Fred was quietly putting his guitar back in his case. All the commotion was too much for his quiet soul.”
Bobby Charles may be the quintessential Woodstock album of the early seventies. The key to its swampy charm may be that none of the musicians thought they were cutting anything more than demos. The sleepy, sensual nature of its country funk comes from its early-hours, booze-loosened provenance. “I was tending bar when Bobby made that album,” says Jeremy Wilber, “and I can tell you that the entire record was made between the hours of four a.m. and whenever they finally collapsed.” Like everyone else, Wilber fell in love with the bayou bard. “There was just something so blithe about Bobby,” he says. “He would walk into our establishments and run up these enormous bar tabs without any means of paying them.”
The special magic of Bobby Charles also stemmed from the input of the players rounded up for the sessions. “The basic band was N. D. on drums, me on bass, Amos on guitar, and John Simon on piano,” says Jim Colegrove. “Bobby had a lot of songs and would transmit them to us, because he didn’t play an instrument. If you made a wrong change he’d say, ‘No, it dunt do that.’ And that’s how you learned the song.” Bolstering the core unit was an all-star assembly of the town’s finest roots musicians—the Band boys, Geoff Muldaur, John Till, Billy Mundi, David Sanborn, and Nashville pedal-steel maestro Ben Keith, then newly arrived in town—along with visitors Bobby Neuwirth and Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack, who contributed an insouciant organ part to “Small Town Talk,” one of two songs Bobby cowrote with Rick Danko.** “John Simon started out as the producer,” says Jim Colegrove. “But then Bobby said, ‘I don’t think we’re going in the right direction with this; I’d like to get somebody else involved.’ And that somebody was Danko.”
Bobby’s Bearsville classic, featuring Willie the golden retriever (1972)
“Bobby and Rick used to come to our house at three in the morning,” says Christopher Parker. “I had drums and a Wurlitzer piano and a really cool Gibson violin bass, so they knew they could jam there. It was like, ‘Hey man, we got this idea for a tune, man!’ My wife would say, ‘Oh my God!’ But we always let them in, and some good music came out of it.” “Small Town Talk” was Bobby’s wry portrait of Woodstock as a kind of rock and roll Peyton Place. “It was about the class system there, the gossip,” says Paula Batson. Other highlights on the album included the opening “Street People,” a languorously funky homage to Charles’s years on the run; “Long Face,” a Lee Dorsey–esque track featuring Levon Helm on drums; and “I Must Be in a Good Place Now,” with its happy evocation of blissful love and “wild apple trees.”
“He’s Got All the Whiskey,” meanwhile, was a song of hilarious envy that spoke for everyone in Woodstock trying to keep up with the Albert Grossmans of the world. “That was another song we did in one cut,” Charles said. “We went and woke Billy Mundi up. It had snowed and hardly anybody could get up to the studio. Billy was staying in one of Albert’s cabins so I went and asked if he felt like going into the studio with me. He jumped out of the bed into his pants.” When they got to Bearsville, Todd Rundgren was trying to fix the mixing desk. “We had to sit there for a couple of hours,” Charles remembered. “I said, ‘I’m not leaving till I’ve put this fucking song down.’ Ben Keith said, ‘Well, I’m sticking with you,’ and Billy said, ‘Well, I ain’t going nowhere.’ And now here come two other people up the hill, Buzzy Feiten and John Till—they walked up that fucking mountain with their guitars and when Todd finally got the board fixed we put down the song in one take.”**
Another track, “Grow Too Old,” revived an old chestnut Bobby had cowritten with Fats Domino in the fifties. “There was a great deal of disagreement on how it should go,” says Jim Colegrove. “We were almost at each other’s throats. So someone pulls out a bottle of cocaine, and then everything’s fine!” Amos Garrett was magnificent throughout the album, never more so than in the shimmering shapes he sprinkled over “Tennessee Blues,” which additionally featured heartbreaking accordion counterpoint from Garth Hudson. Delight though it was, Bobby Charles sold poorly. “Bobby didn’t care about promoting his album,” says Paul Fishkin. “Aesthetically there were a lot of great songs, but we couldn’t put the machine behind it. He was just drinking up at the Bear every night.”
Meanwhile, Mac Rebennack’s brief sojourn in Woodstock ended unhappily after he got wise to a deal that Grossman and his management partner were using to blindside him. “The very first thing [Albert] did was hand me over to his hand-chosen flunky Bennett Glotzer,” Rebennack wrote. “[He] informed me that Albert and company now owned one-third of my publishing rights. ‘The hell you do,’ I said, and I got out of his office fast.” Rebennack resorted to some “basic voodoo,” placing a dead bird on Glotzer’s New York doorstep and lighting black candles around it. Later, outside the Troubadour in L.A., he thought he saw Glotzer reach inside his coat for a gun and “busted the shit out of him.”
Beckoned up to Woodstock by the Band and Bobby Charles, Rebennack accepted Grossman’s hospitality in one of his Turtle Creek cabins but quickly soured on his hidden agenda. “You need to un-sic this fucking asshole off me,” he complained to Grossman of Glotzer. Getting only an airy and noncommittal response, he reached over to a peyote plant on Grossman’s desk and yanked off one of the buttons. Grossman flipped out, saying he’d been growing it for years. Rebennack shrugged: “As far as I was concerned, he was trying to screw me three ways to Christmas and he’d earned his doom and destruction.”
Grossman resorted to a time-honored tactic, insinuating that he would destroy Rebennack’s career. The two men yelled at each other for twenty minutes before Grossman had Rebennack thrown out of the room. The experience seemed to bear out what Bob Dylan had been through: “They’d take money from me, on top of the percentage they were taking for handling me,” Rebennack recalled. “As soon as I grasped this deal and all that it was about, I said ‘Fuck you’ and I walked.”
JIM COLEGROVE REMEMBERS Bobby Charles introducing him to Rebennack at Deanie’s, the social meeting place of choice for Woodstock’s music community. “As it got later, the families who’d been having their dinners would leave,” says Barbara O’Brien, who waitressed at the restaurant. “And then the party people would come in to start their evenings.”
“Deanie’s was where the drinking began,” confirms Maria Muldaur. “For the serious drinking, we’d all go to the bar at the Bear.” The Bear’s handsome bartender Michael Word poured generous shots for the Muldaurs—and for Bobby Charles, Paul Butterfield, and Amos Garrett. “They invented a drink called ‘The Pretty Bad,’” says Maria. “It was fresh-squeezed orange juice, Bacardi rum, tonic, and lime, and they would each have some of those while Richard Manuel drank hideous amounts of Cointreau. I’d have a few sips of Grand Marnier and be three sheets to the wind. And that’s when we all discovered margaritas.”
The Muldaurs, Garrett, and Butterfield were hanging at Deanie’s one night when Albert Grossman unexpectedly walked in. “He took one look at us,” says Garrett, “and he said, ‘Well, there’s a band.’” Butterfield might have been forgiven a certain wariness at the remark. Though Grossman had managed and supported him for over five years, their relationship had been tested during the last days of the Butterfield Blues Band. “Bills weren’t getting paid,” says Jim Rooney. “Bennett was down in New York running the office, and Albert was just not paying attention. The band went away in a flash, and Paul never recovered.” While horn men David Sanborn, Trevor Lawrence, and Steve Maddio split to join Stevie Wonder’s group, three others—Buzz Feiten, Philip Wilson, and Gene Dinwiddie—formed Woodstock fusion band Full Moon with keyboard player Neil Larsen. “Full Moon played the Sled Hill, doing jazz-rock before it was even labeled,” says Jim Weider. “For me it was eye-opening, because they really stretched stuff out, doing funk but with jazz technique over the top of rhythm and blues.” After one eponymous 1972 album of Steely Dan–style instrumentals, the group disbanded. “Clive Davis loved Full Moon, but they didn’t make it out onto the road,” says Lynne Naso. “They couldn’t even get out of their hotel rooms.” Twenty years later, on March 25, 1992, Wilson was murdered in a drug-related execution in the East Village. “He’d become addicted to bad things,” says Naso. “He was always around bad, crazy people, and one of them took his life.”
In Woodstock, Butterfield drowned his disappointment in dope and booze rather than reproach his hometown protector. “Paul never called Albert on that whole debacle of the band going down,” says Jim Rooney. “And they’d been making good money.” Maria Muldaur recalls visiting Butterfield on icy winter nights at his Wittenberg house and finding him “banging away” at an out-of-tune piano. “The only thing that kept him together was his wife, Kathy,” says Graham Blackburn. “I don’t know why he was out of control, other than that he was a basic inner-city Chicago kid.”
Grossman may have felt guilty about Butterfield: Michael Friedman has claimed that he “knew that Butterfield was his ward for the rest of his life.” More likely, he saw an opportunity to get a deal for a Woodstock supergroup—and in the process get Butterfield and the Muldaurs back out on the road. As it turned out, Maria would soon withdraw from the nucleus, and not just because her husband had taken up with Sheila Moony Rooney. “Paul and Geoffrey and Amos wanted to have a real macho, rock ’em sock ’em, high-energy electric R&B band,” Maria says. “So that’s what they went off and did.”
To his credit, Butterfield wanted the new group to be a properly democratic unit, a sum of equal parts. When they settled on the name Better Days—from a phrase of Bobby Charles’s—Butterfield battled Grossman and Paul Fishkin not to have it prefixed by his own name.** With Warner Brothers ponying up a generous quarter-million-dollar advance, Butterfield, Muldaur, and Garrett took their time assembling a super-hot band. Much of the fall of 1972 was spent auditioning drummers, bassists, and keyboard players, none quite right for the rootsy sound the trio wanted. Billy Mundi tried out on drums, former Jerry Garcia sideman John Kahn auditioned on bass. Garcia acolyte Merl Saunders was the band’s first organist.
In October, Butterfield and Muldaur found their drummer, nineteen-year-old Christopher Parker. “I was playing around Woodstock in power trios, gospel groups, any band that would have me,” Parker says. “I started to notice this guy with a full beard and a big fur hat who was often in the audience. He looked like some wacko Eskimo. I never put it together that it was Butterfield.” Parker’s first rehearsal with Better Days was at the Muldaurs’ place in Glenford, with Kahn and Saunders still in the lineup. “Geoff and Paul were singing together, and there was a good friction there,” Parker says. “Garth Hudson came by to check it out, and Albert came to check what was happening.” This iteration of Better Days played about a dozen shows and even posed for Bearsville publicity pictures at Butterfield’s house. Within a month, Kahn had been replaced by Taj Mahal’s bassist Billy Rich and Saunders by an old acquaintance of Mac Rebennack’s. “Maybe Mac suggested Ronnie Barron, or it might have been Bobby Charles,” says Parker.** “Butterfield was coming from his horn band, which was a virtuoso blues and jazz thing, and he wanted a very different kind of band with all these disparate influences coming to bear.”
Meanwhile Muldaur was busy reinventing himself, sloughing off his jug-band folkie past and toughening up as a singer. “Geoff brought a lot of music in—Bix Beiderbecke, Nina Simone,” says Parker. “He was very eclectic and an excellent piano player and taskmaster. It was like, ‘This is how we’re gonna do it, and we’ve got to get the vocals right.’ When he’d get his teeth into a tune like Percy Mayfield’s ‘Please Send Me Someone to Love,’ he’d research it and really live the song before he felt he could sing it properly.” Then there was Garrett, whose playing was the band’s secret weapon. “Amos wasn’t as funky as some of the guys Paul had played with,” says Muldaur, “but the sound he was getting was obviously history in the making.”
By the time Better Days started work on their debut album at Bearsville, they had no fewer than four singers: Butterfield, Muldaur, Barron, and even Garrett, who added his eccentric vocal tones to the brew. And that’s without factoring in the floating presence of Bobby Charles, who supplied the rueful “Done a Lot of Wrong Things” for the record. Charles certainly made a difference to Ronnie Barron, who’d first pitched up in Bearsville on a dark fall night. “It was remote, cold and creepy,” Barron told Tom Ellis III. “I’m a city guy and it was this quaint little town. Then I’m being driven down this long dirt road, and I arrive at this villa in the middle of nowhere. It’s Grossman’s place.” Initially bridling at Muldaur’s and Butterfield’s manner—“I picked Paul up over my head, and that shocked everybody there”—Barron was soon mollified by Charles. He even came round to Muldaur, saluting him as someone who “helped me find myself again.” “People like Bobby and Ronnie were people we had never seen before,” says Maria Muldaur. “We were just hippies, whereas Ronnie had this whole old-school R&B showbiz thing that he did and used to wear all this hairspray.” Charles, meanwhile, endeared himself to Christopher Parker by giving him a bejeweled crayfish brooch. “Bobby was an absolute sweetheart,” Parker says. “Plus he had the reputation as a killer songwriter, so everybody wanted to sing with him or jam with him or, ideally, cowrite with him.” Geoff Muldaur was equally entranced: “Bobby said more things during a day than you could have written in five songs. The way he talked, you’d think, ‘Fuck, why am I not writing this down?’ So that was another flavor that came into the band.”
With the album finished, the group embarked on a punishing sixty-date tour of the States that confused many promoters: Was this the Paul Butterfield they knew or a totally new entity? Or what? “That whole thing was the worst of Albert,” says Paul Fishkin. “He managed them, but he wanted to show Butter that he could be Albert. So he did his classic thing of forcing the promoters to pay high guarantees. He pissed off everybody, and he did it because he was Albert. And then ten people showed up in every market because they didn’t know that Better Days was Butterfield. The promoters ate it bad, and they hated Albert for it.” Adding to the friction was the fact that most of the Warners advance went to Butterfield instead of being shared between the band members. “They were bitching and moaning,” said Nick Gravenites, whose “Buried Alive in the Blues”—unfinished on Joplin’s Pearl—was a highlight of the Better Days album. “Albert just said, ‘No, forget it. If you’re gonna do that, I’m not gonna get you the deal.’”
“Paul and Albert were close in a very measured and secretive way,” says Geoff Muldaur. “And that was actually a problem for the band. Our eyes were so closed to business.” To Christopher Parker, Bearsville Records was deeply dysfunctional: “By that time it had too many kinds of artist and not enough budget. There was also a lot of peer pressure among the artists, like who got the new Mercedes, and was that based on record sales, or was it based on who could manipulate Albert to their advantage.”
Released in March 1973, Paul Butterfield’s Better Days was a cracking collection. “New Walking Blues” reworked East-West’s “Walkin’ Blues” as a throbbing cousin of the Band’s “The Shape I’m In.” “Rule the Road” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go” were sultry bottleneck blues, the latter featuring Maria Muldaur on fiddle and backing vocals. Rod Hicks’s “Highway 28” was a clarion call to Woodstock itself, complete with name checks for Garrett, Barron, and “Topher” (Parker). If Butterfield was never the most accomplished singer—his growl of a voice remains the template for a thousand mediocre white blues men—his harp playing was nonpareil, and Geoff Muldaur was a revelation. “We’re the only band around that’s playing rooted American music,” Muldaur told an interviewer. If it wasn’t quite true, it was still a great boast. “It was definitely the furthest Paul ever got away from the Chicago harmonica or horn band sound,” Amos Garrett said. “That band was a very unique rhythm and blues band. It incorporated blues influences of Paul’s, but it had an acoustic Delta influence of Geoffrey’s and a heavy New Orleans feel from Ronnie. My playing was just so strange. It kind of fit in everywhere, in every context.”
A second Better Days album, It All Comes Back, appeared within months of the first. This time Bobby Charles had four cowriting credits, including a new version of the beloved “Small Town Talk.” He wrote the karmic title track and—with Butterfield—the lustily funky “Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It,” a virtual credo for the debauched life of seventies Woodstock: Butterfield himself was in the grip of a cocaine habit, and the rest of the band were hardly immune. “Things were getting difficult for Paul,” says Graham Blackburn. “But as long as you could still stand up and play, everything was justified.”
It all came back: the second Bearsville album by Butterfield’s Better Days, released in 1973
“There was a musical evolution but a character devolution,” says Geoff Muldaur. “That’s the sadness of some of this era. The second album had too much cocaine on it. There were people who seemed to be able to handle coke, but maybe they didn’t do it the way we did it.” Muldaur had in any case left Woodstock with Sheila Moony Rooney and would eventually—after four solo albums—give up music altogether for several years.**
“Maybe my survival instinct was kicking in,” Muldaur says. “The problem with leaving was that I took myself with me, but it really might have saved me. Because it was just getting too funky in Woodstock.” Meanwhile his estranged wife took a chance on a solo deal of her own when she moved to California and—with Amos Garrett playing gloriously behind her—scored a huge 1974 hit with the coolly beautiful “Midnight at the Oasis.”
WITH THE MULDAURS gone and Butterfield sinking into addiction, even Bobby Charles fell out of love with Woodstock. Though Grossman offered him a deal for a second Bearsville album, Charles heard too many bad things about his business practices and so extricated himself from his contract. “He and I didn’t get along at all,” Charles recalled. “He’d say one thing and then do another. When I’d go to sign the papers, he’d have something else on it.” Local legend has it that Charles’s parting words to Grossman were “Adios, motherfucker!”
In 1975, Charles returned to his native Louisiana and spent the remainder of his days there. “I’ve been to his house recently,” swamp-pop legend Johnnie Allan said in 1979. “He lives out in a secluded area of Abbeville, way back in the woods. Bobby’s always been a loner.” Jim Rooney thinks Charles had got everything out of Woodstock that he was ever going to get. “He was a very sweet person, but he was hard to help,” Rooney says. “A friend of mine engineered for him to get his royalties for ‘See You Later, Alligator,’ and he took Bobby up to meet the fellow in some penthouse apartment. Bobby goes, ‘So this is what you’ve been doing with all the money you stole from me!’ That was the end of the conversation.”
“Bobby always had someone who was screwing him,” says Geoff Muldaur. “He said Levon was screwing him. I’d tell people, ‘Levon’s always complaining about Robbie, and now Bobby’s complaining about Levon!’ But we had some times. He once took me to a roadhouse near Lafayette and we watched a cockfight. Then we went around the corner, and there was a marquee that said ‘Blues Tonight.’ Inside the club were Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins. That was pretty amazing.”
* The other man was also a Southerner named Bobby. “Bobby Lynn Shehorn was a songwriter from Texas,” says Colegrove. “He was doing all the chauffeuring, because Bobby Charles didn’t have a driving license.”
* Years later, with Charles looking on, Rebennack coproduced Sharon McNally’s album Small Town Talk (The Songs of Bobby Charles).
* Both Mundi and Feiten had played—alongside Harvey Brooks and the album’s de facto producer Al Kooper—on Dylan’s New Morning album.
* Muldaur wanted to call the band Success. “There’s a couple of publicity photos of us in front of this Nash Rambler with the name Success on it,” says Christopher Parker. “I think Kathy Butterfield took the pictures.”
* Along with his other grievances against him, Mac Rebennack claimed Bennett Glotzer stole Barron from his band following the release of Dr. John’s Gumbo (1972). It was Barron who’d developed the original “Night Tripper” persona, a character he called “Reverend Ether,” which then morphed into the “Dr. John” of 1968’s exotically sinister Gris-Gris. Years later he played on Tom Waits’s albums Heartattack and Vine (1980) and Swordfishtrombones (1983). He died in 1997.
* Muldaur’s long silence would be broken in 1998 by the release of a glorious blues and gospel album called The Secret Handshake. The album featured such Woodstock/Bearsville alumni as Amos Garrett, Bill Rich, and Howard Johnson.