WALK THROUGH THE center of Woodstock at night, and it’s difficult to picture the scene that would have greeted you forty years ago. The place is not quite a graveyard, but it can be eerily quiet after dark. Back in the early seventies, the little Catskills town buzzed with nightlife, street people, the assorted flotsam and jetsam of the post-sixties counterculture. “There were bars everywhere and no cable television,” says Woodstock Times editor Brian Hollander. “People had to come out at night if they wanted entertainment.”
Though the Elephant and the Sled Hill Café were gone by 1972, the Café Espresso still featured live music, and other venues popped up to fill the vacuum. On the site of the old Brass Rail, on Rock City Road, Rosa’s Cantina hosted folk singers and poetry readings. On the same street was Richie Mellert’s Village Jug, which had opened in the spring of 1968. Out in Mount Tremper was the White Water Depot, while close to Bearsville sat the Watering Troff, in Hollander’s words “a bucket-of-blood kind of bar, with fights in the parking lots and a lot of people drinking really hard and playing country music.” The Troff had taken over the premises from Bernard and Mary Lou Paturel’s Country Pie and drew an eclectic mix of bohos and local working people. “The rednecks and the artists would get together there and drink,” says Hollander. “It wasn’t as chic as the Bear, but there’d be city transplants, gay guys sitting at the bar and drinking with the cowboys.” Hollander’s future wife, Fran Bruno, rounded up aspirant performers for the bar’s Sunday jam sessions. One was Cindy Cashdollar, who in 1975 returned from eighteen feckless months in Florida. “The Troff was a really good education in just playing with people,” she says, “as well as playing whatever form of western swing there was in Woodstock at that time. It was where I started playing Dobro. Everybody was very nice and very generous in allowing you to sit in.”
One establishment, however, defined Woodstock’s live music scene in the seventies. “The Joyous Lake was wild,” says Michael Lang, “in a country kind of way.” The Lake was an archetypal Woodstock story. Ron and Valma Merians had begun visiting the town in the late sixties, renting a house on Plochmann Lane that became a weekend hang for the likes of Mike Jeffery and Bob Richardson. “Cass Elliott came to stay,” says Valma. “We were very friendly with Peter Max when he was working for Milton Glaser. There were people who were living in the Woodstock area that were not hippies, who were very special and educated people. Plus we were rich! We weren’t walking around putting flowers in our hair.”
Ron Merians was the Brooklyn-born son of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants, his father a manufacturer of orthopedic shoes in Manhattan. In swinging sixties New York he’d veered away from podiatry and fallen in with the beautiful people. A marriage to his high-school sweetheart broke up when he met Valma at the Dakota on Central Park West. “He was a very magnetic personality,” says the woman who’d worked as a model in London and been photographed by David Bailey. “He had a good rap, and he took my breath away.” Through Valma, Ron landed a job with ad agency Ted Bates, for whom she had modeled in a campaign for Kool cigarettes. In a storyline straight out of Mad Men, the agency’s then-president Barry Ballister dropped out of the rat race and moved up to Woodstock, later opening the farmers’ market Sunfrost Farms near Bearsville. “Ron had been working with Barry,” says Valma. “One day he says to me, ‘How would you feel about moving up to Woodstock full-time? I don’t want to raise our children in the city.’”
The Merianses were already living on Plochmann Lane when Michael Lang invited them to the Woodstock Festival. “We had a BMW motorbike we’d imported from Munich,” says Valma. “We decided to take a ride down to the festival, where Michael gave us backstage passes.” The festival confirmed they were in the right place at the right time: Woodstock had become the East Coast vortex for the Aquarian Age.
The following year the Merianses opened a macrobiotic food store and juice bar at the corner of Mill Hill Road and Deming Street. Naming it the Joyous Lake after throwing the I Ching, they quickly attracted the town’s in-crowd. “Lots of people came up to Woodstock after the festival,” says Valma. “And it was like, ‘Where do you go?’ Well, you went to the Lake, where there were great vibes and good food and everyone was friendly. It was kind of like hanging out on the King’s Road in Chelsea.”
Along with the influx came Albert Grossman. “People were always complaining about him, but to me he was a special soul,” Valma says. “I adored him, though I never had anything to do with him business-wise.” Rather less adorable was Tim Hardin, who often dropped in to demand that Valma cook for him. “He just seemed like such a pathetic person,” she says. “So I cooked him sautéed chicken with grapes and brown rice, and he fell in love with it. A couple of days later he comes in with a guitar and asks for more food.” Another customer was Charles Mingus, who came with his wife, Sue. “They ate at the Lake a lot,” Valma says. “He’d show up in the morning and say, ‘I need some of your oatmeal, lady!’”
Both Hardin and Mingus performed at the Lake after Ron decided in 1972 to build a small stage in the restaurant. Inspired by the Trident in Sausalito, the Merianses took a leaf out of Grossman’s book and hired the finest local carpenters to fit the place out. They also installed the best sound system money could buy, with speakers embedded in the ceiling to disperse the music. “The sound would rain down on you,” says Jim Weider. For Martha Velez, whose son Taj played with the Merianses’ daughter Three, the Lake was “a very prestigious venue, with good sound and good lights.” The food from the open kitchen was great, and the underdressed waitresses almost as edible. “I only hired beautiful women—it’s terrible,” says Valma. “No, it’s not terrible—it’s true!”
“The Lake was jumping when I moved here,” says Ian Kimmet. “I’d sit outside with Albert and Barry Feinstein, and there were people queuing round the block. It was the center of everything.” For many people, weekends entailed a ritual of starting at Deanie’s and heading up to the Lake—and then ending up back at Deanie’s for breakfast.** To folk guitarist Peter Walker, Ron Merians was “the same kind of hero that Albert was. . . . He created something out of nothing, and it was the best scene in the world.”
Though regular live attractions at the Lake included local favorites Orleans, the Striders, and the Fabulous Rhinestones—along with the Traums, the Muldaurs, Paul Butterfield, and more—the place also became an essential stop for touring stars like Bonnie Raitt, Dr. John, Johnny Winter, Taj Mahal, Joe Cocker, and John Hammond. Jazz, blues, and funk acts, too, were well received. “Ron and Valma were very wise to the New York scene,” says Christopher Parker, who played at the Lake with Raitt, John Hall, and others but was also part of a super-hot jazz-funk band that had recently formed in the city. Dubbing themselves the Encyclopedia of Soul, bassist Gordon Edwards, pianist Richard Tee, and guitarist Cornell Dupree had all contributed to landmark R&B sessions in New York studios. In 1974 they began playing Mondays through Thursdays at Mikell’s on Columbus and Ninety-Seventh, bolstered in due course by the additions of guitarist Eric Gale and drummer Steve Gadd. “When I came back to Woodstock, Butterfield said, ‘Gordon ruined you!’” Parker says with a laugh. “I said, ‘Whaddya mean?’ He said, ‘Well, you had this great feel, and now you’re like a metronome.’ Which was the point: I wanted to play perfect time, rather than in that looser Chicago groove.”
One night in 1975, Michael Lang walked into Mikell’s and was blown away by the Encyclopedia of Soul’s slick Crusaders-meets-Steely-Dan grooves: Tee’s churchy chords, Dupree’s biting fills, and the double rhythmic dynamo of Parker and Gadd. Lang paired the band with Joe Cocker, whom he managed, and subsequently made a deal for them—as Stuff—at Warner Brothers. When he pointed them in the direction of Ron Merians, Stuff became a fixture at the Joyous Lake, spending whole weekends upstate. “I loved that band,” says Jim Weider. “The grooves were ridiculous: Steve and Chris together were mind-blowing, and Richard Tee’s rhythm would just float with the gospel influence of his chords. That band was giant for me in this town, and they liked it up here.”**
Along with Stuff, jazz icons such as Jack DeJohnette, Gary Burton, Chico Hamilton, Dexter Gordon, and Chet Baker all played the Lake. Mingus’s 1976 set took place on a December night so cold he arrived with snow in his beard. Lake jams meanwhile became semi-legendary. “I saw a lot of them,” says Jim Weider. “Bobby Charles would sit in with John Hall and Stuff. Butter would always come down and jam.” Harvey Brooks says wintertime was prime jamming season, since no one had anything else to do. He singles out as a special memory a “snowy evening” that involved himself, fellow Fabulous Rhinestone Kal David, Jack DeJohnette, Howard Johnson, and David Sanborn: “We played till breakfast.” The Lake also hosted shows by Chicago blues stalwarts Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, James Cotton, and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.
“Everybody talks about the Lake as a big party place, and it was, but the music was incredible,” says Jane Traum. “The people that played there, in this little town, it was staggering. If we were coming back from New York, we’d say, ‘Let’s just stop by and see who’s playing at the Lake.’ And nearly always it was somebody you really wanted to see—whether it was Stuff, who were sensational, or little bands like Country Cooking. It was so eclectic.”
TO DESCRIBE THE Joyous Lake as a “party place” is one of the great understatements. Like a rural outpost of Manhattan’s most decadent haunts, the club quickly succumbed to the cocaine epidemic ripping through mid-seventies America. “I probably spilled more coke in that place than most people snort in their lives,” says Kasim Sulton. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but at that point cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol were all you did all day and night. If you want to see my first house, get a camera and stick it up my nose.”
For local writer Martha Frankel, who worked as the Lake’s cashier, it was as if all Woodstock’s grown-ups had vanished and left a bunch of out-of-control children to run the show. “Almost all the business owners, chefs, bartenders, and town officials were play-acting at being adults,” she later wrote, “and yet there they were, out front and in charge.” Like everyone else who worked for the Merianses, Frankel witnessed scenes of hedonism and promiscuity that would make her hair curl today. “The waitresses at the Joyous Lake wore tiny little short-shorts and bandanas tied strategically around their breasts,” she wrote. “When they went missing for fifteen minutes, you knew they were either getting high in the walk-in or giving blowjobs in the bathroom.” The sex-for-cocaine culture then rife in rock and roll was in full flow at the Lake, particularly in the infamous Green Room upstairs. “When you went through that door, you never knew what you were going to see,” says Linda Sheldon. “Nine times out of ten it was somebody getting a blowjob. Lotta girls got in for free that way.” Nobody talked about sexual harassment, Frankel wrote, because “nobody cared.”
Things became markedly more debauched in the bacchanalian era of disco. Though Woodstock was a long way from the world of Saturday Night Fever, the Lake’s weekend clientele brought a touch of Studio 54 glamour to Mill Hill Road. In the words of Catskills jeweler Robin “The Hammer” Ludwig, “it was where Woodstock met the jet set . . . elite counterculture.” If the seventies had begun as a postradical Me Decade, cocaine—the ultimate ego enhancer—turned it into the Me First decade. Never one to pass up a commercial opportunity, Ron Merians introduced the Lake’s first Disco Night in 1976. Spinning the discs was Linda Sheldon, who’d deejayed in a club in Rochester and befriended the Woodstock bands that played there. “The Rhinestones would say, ‘You gotta come to Woodstock,’” she says. “They kept talking to Ronald, who called me and said, ‘They tell me I have to have you.’”
Woodstock shocked Sheldon. “You have to remember what the town was like in 1976,” she says. “There were crazy people everywhere.” Characters with nicknames like Juicy Brucey, Liquid Lloyd, and Magic Markie were stuck in a lysergic time warp, while the new funky-but-chic crowd colonized the Lake and—when they hadn’t snorted too much appetite-suppressing powder—ate steaks at the Bear. “The Lake was only three bucks at the door, which people from the city would laugh at,” says Sheldon. “But everybody drank when they danced. It’s hard to believe now, but there would be two or three hundred people in that little building.”
Sheldon’s Tuesday Disco Nights took off so quickly that Merians was forced to start a bigger night on Fridays. “The thing that made me a little different was that I played the Stones and Elvis Costello, because I felt all that stuff was danceable,” Sheldon says. “I was a little miffed at the beginning that I was having to spin disco records, because I was, y’know, too good for that!” She soon got the twelve-inch bug, however. One night, “high as a kite,” she looked down from her booth to see a half-soused Paul Butterfield shouting up at her. “I wanna hear ‘The Rubberband Man’!” he yelled through the music. “That was Paul’s favorite song,” she says. “So whenever I saw him, I’d mix the Spinners in.” One morning Sheldon picked up the latest Woodstock Times to find Merians had placed an ad announcing “Dance Night! With Disco Linda!” It’s a tag she’s never quite shaken off: “Even today, if I go in the meat market, it’s like, ‘Hey Disco, how’s it goin’?’”
Sheldon was at the Lake the night the Stones booked it to celebrate the birthdays of Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood. “Ron Merians was no fool,” says Stan Beinstein. “He said, ‘They’re gonna leave town in five days, and I’m gonna get stuck with five grand’s worth of food and booze. If they’re gonna throw a party, they’re paying for it.’ Everybody went, ‘Are you crazy?’ But Jagger respected it. And that night I wound up in a conversation with Charlie, Artie Traum, and Albert Grossman. I got Charlie’s ear by telling him about the night Mingus played.”
Though Merians hated punk rock and would have kept it out of the club if he could, he was obliged to make the occasional concession to the abrasive new sounds coming up from the city. “One rainy Thursday night, Ron put the Talking Heads on when they were still a trio,” says Beinstein. “There’s, like, eight people in the room, and he says, ‘Get this shit off my stage.’ People said, ‘Ron, these are the darlings of CBGBs! They’re the Talking Heads!’ He said, ‘I don’t care if they’re the Flaming Assholes, get ’em off the stage!’” In time, however, the Lake became home to local new-wave acts like the Johnny Average Band, fronted by English guitarist Mick Hodgkinson and his wife, Nicole “Nikki” Wills.**
Merians and his wife were a volatile combination. “When I first met them, they were living down at the end of Deming Street, and they were all lovey-dovey,” says Linda Sheldon. “Ron was this cool guy from the city, and Valma was really beautiful. They had three kids. But things started going bad, and when they went bad, they went really bad.”
“There were extraordinary nights with Butterfield and Danko and Orleans and Richie Havens, but Ron was having too much fun,” says Stan Beinstein, who promoted Lake shows on Radio Woodstock. “He and Valma were coming apart at the seams. I would get a phone call from him at ten thirty in the morning: ‘I’m comin’ down with some cash; I gotta get this on the air.’ At eleven o’clock she’s calling: ‘Cancel everything!’ It was like nobody was in charge anymore.” Martha Frankel wrote that the Merianses fought like “demented, brain-damaged boxers, throwing pitchers of beer at each other,” yet minutes later they’d be “kissing while they sautéed garlic and shrimp with lemon and tomatoes.” The Lake’s staff were a drug-crazed family, forced to take sides in the marital wars. “You always felt you were being dragged into the middle of this melodrama,” says Linda Sheldon. “At the end it got really, really fucked up.”
In 1978, Valma Merians took up with record producer Eddy Offord, who’d been brought over from England by Albert Grossman to engineer tracks on Utopia’s Ra. Smitten by the beautiful Mrs. Merians, Offord watched her marriage unravel and then “just swooped in and went for it.” The couple’s elopement signaled the end of the Merians era in Woodstock. Interviewed at the Lake as he was “about to tear it down,” Ron talked of wanting a better quality of family life. Within a year he’d moved to California. “He never even said good-bye,” says Linda Sheldon. “The next thing you knew, Valma and Eddy were in the city. And after they were all gone, nobody much talked about them anymore.”
Valma Merians disputes that the Lake closed because of drugs and divorce. “It closed because it was over,” she says. “Ronald and I drove this comet across the sky for ten years, and then it was the eighties. The whole business was changing. I remember talking to Albert about how bigger venues were coming in. People weren’t just coming up the road and playing at the Lake on their way to somewhere else.” Under new management the Lake reopened, but it was never the same. “The Sanchez family took it over from Ron,” says Linda Sheldon. “And then the next owner ripped everything out, all the beautiful carving, all the mahogany, and turned it into, like, a bar in Newburgh. 1986 was when everything seemed to go by the wayside. The last three years were horrible. A job I had absolutely loved had turned into something I detested.”
Ron Merians died in 1989, age just fifty-five, after suffering a massive brain aneurysm. He’d moved back to the East Coast and was even talking to his old Woodstock friends—Peter Max, Michael Lang—about starting again in the town with a new club. Fifteen years later, filmmaker David McDonald made a documentary about the town’s wild countercultural history, Woodstock: Can’t Get There From Here (2005), in which he trained a laser beam on the torrid life of the Lake using black-and-white photographs by Howard Greenberg to tell the story of the Merianses and their infamous establishment. One of the more salacious images showed Ron snorting cocaine. After showing the film in Saugerties, McDonald received a call from a New Jersey lawyer threatening to keep him in litigation for the rest of his life. “The guy said, ‘This film will never see the light of day,’” says Stan Beinstein. “So the wheels of paranoia continue to spin.” McDonald was even accused of anti-Semitism by people demanding to know why he’d targeted Merians but hadn’t condemned Ralph Whitehead. “I got this feeling that I’d touched some kind of nerve,” he says. “But I also thought I was just telling the truth.”
Still married to Eddy Offord, Valma prefers to remember the crazy fun of those high times. “Everybody loves negativity and sensational journalism, but that wasn’t what it was about,” she says. “I don’t want to hear about the bad drugs. Everybody was having a good time. Whatever his faults, Ron was a great guy. They’d never seen the likes of him in Woodstock before, and he always loved people. He was a good soul.”
* After his original restaurant burned down in 1974, Deanie Elwyn bought the old Town House, a gay-friendly establishment opposite the Woodstock golf course, and reopened Deanie’s there.
* Among the more unlikely artists that Stuff backed was Fred Neil, whom Michael Lang still managed. They played behind him on an unreleased album cut in New Jersey in 1978.
* Hodgkinson had moved to Woodstock to play with Elizabeth Barraclough. He then formed the retro-slanted Johnny Average & the Falcons, a fluid fixture of late-seventies Woodstock whose members included fellow Brits Ian “Little Roy Watson” Kimmet, John “Brian Briggs” Holbrook, and Mick “Shane Fontayne” Barakan.