WHEN THE PLAYFULLY irreverent Paul Morley visited Woodstock in the late winter of 1982—ostensibly to report for the UK’s NME on Todd Rundgren’s video studio—a blizzard stranded him in town and delayed his return to New York. Taking pity on the English journalist was, in his words, a “creased old man with the crotch of his jeans hanging round his knees and the dusty grey hair tied into a long pony tail,” who drove him back to his Bearsville pile and plied him with cognac and “some fruit bread” flown in from California.
Also being plied by Albert Grossman that afternoon was Al Aronowitz, a hero of Morley’s whom Grossman had saved from penury in Washington, DC. “Albert was pretty kind to me when I was broke on welfare,” Aronowitz told me in 1991. “He brought me up to Woodstock and gave me a free house to live in.” Grossman had done the same for Barry Feinstein, who moved to Woodstock after divorcing Tonight Show star Carol Wayne. “Barry stayed in one of Albert’s cabins, but he got terribly bored,” says Ian Kimmet. “He’d say, ‘Nothing ever happens here.’ But then he never went anywhere.” Feinstein, who later married local painter Judith Jamison, was part of Grossman’s inner echelon—in Kasim Sulton’s recollection, “constantly at Albert’s side.” He would accompany Grossman to boxing matches, the two men acting out a kind of Maileresque machismo together.**
Another Woodstocker invited to fights was Robbie Dupree, who’d moved back east after a stint in Los Angeles that brought him a top 10 hit with 1980’s slick “Steal Away.” “The phone would ring, and Albert would say, ‘Thursday night there’s a fight, you wanna come?’” he remembers. “Then a shitty-looking old limousine would pull up with a guy in a flannel shirt driving, and we’d pile in and go down to the city or Newburgh, or just to Kingston. Albert was fascinated by that kind of physical prowess. He was a sedentary man himself, but he got a vibe off people like that, just like he’d gotten a vibe off all the hard-edged guys he managed or had on his label.”
Many saw Grossman’s largesse toward Feinstein and Aronowitz as proof of his essential goodness—or at least of his good side, since he continued to be a perplexing mix of generosity and vindictiveness. “It’s like there was Albert, and then there was his evil twin,” says Cindy Cashdollar, who’d graduated to working as Ian Kimmet’s assistant. “And I never knew which one I was going to get on any given day. He could be very gruff and cranky, but I also saw kindness from him towards Elizabeth Barraclough and Randy Vanwarmer. He genuinely cared about people who’d moved to the area and were trying to get settled there.” Grossman’s evil twin seemed to manifest itself when Lucinda Hoyt returned to Woodstock in 1981 after living for a few years in Greece. She had come back to help Yvette, a former housekeeper of Grossman’s who was dying in a nearby hospital. “I asked Albert if he wouldn’t do something for her,” she says. “It would only have required a little bit of money. His reaction was, ‘Well, do you want to pay for it?’ I don’t forgive him for doing that to someone who’d been so loyal to him.”
Then there was Grossman’s perennial vagueness. “Albert was incredibly cryptic,” says Mark McKenna. “A typical encounter would be him coming in and saying, ‘Did you take care of that thing?’ And you’d say, ‘What thing?’ And he’d say, ‘Whaddya mean, “What thing?” That thing we talked about!’ And you’d be like, ‘Can you give me more than two syllables?’” More than anything else, though, what made Grossman memorable was his refusal to conform to social norms, dress codes above all. On the occasions when he could be bothered to attend industry gatherings in Manhattan or Los Angeles—or Cannes, where he always went for the annual MIDEM conference—he pointedly declined to wear suits or tuxedos. At a T. J. Martell Foundation dinner honoring his friend Bob Krasnow, he made zero effort to smarten up. “Everybody has to go in black tie, and Albert shows up in a peasant shirt with blue jeans and the cuffs rolled up,” says McKenna. “That was his uniform. He was even nuts about getting a certain kind of wire to wrap his ponytail in.”
Yet behind the fuck-you front was a sadder and lonelier man whose love of rich foods was more gourmand than gourmet. “I remember going with him to the Bearsville market, and he bought a Sarah Lee pound cake from the freezer,” says John Holbrook. “He said, ‘You have to eat it while it’s still cold.’ So he took it back to the office and ate the whole thing.” Though he’d given up smoking, Grossman was chronically unfit—“the only exercise he got was jogging to the refrigerator,” quips David Boyle, who was still doing carpentry jobs for him—and ate red meat like there was no tomorrow. “Once he was making one of his famous hamburgers,” says Ronnie Lyons. “I said, ‘Albert, how big is that thing? Half a pound?’ He said, ‘A pound.’ This girl who was there said, ‘That’s two dozen heart attacks waiting to happen right there!’”
If Grossman was comfort-eating, one of the reasons may have been unvoiced pain over his marriage. “All I knew about Albert and Sally was that he really loved her,” says Mark McKenna. “He doted on her, but there were a lot of periods when they just weren’t together.” Ian Kimmet was chatting with Grossman one day when, out of nowhere, he said, “Worst fucking mistake I ever made.” Kimmet asked what he meant. “Susan Lee,” his boss replied. In that moment, Kimmet got the poignancy of Grossman’s situation: “It fucked up his life. He became very lonely. He would ask me to come up to the house just to talk.” Occasionally Grossman requested that Kimmet drive him to the city to have dinner with Sally. “I could tell that he really cared for her,” Kimmet says. “He was just soft and receptive around her. And then she’d float off again, and we’d drive back up to Bearsville.”
Perversely, Grossman actually set Sally up with Ronnie Lyons, his friend since the sixties. In the winters, Grossman even joined them at the house he’d bought years before in Oaxaca. “That’s just the way he was,” Lyons says. “He had his girlfriends, but Sally was his wife, and he treated her like his wife.” Lucinda Hoyt, however, has a more prosaic theory to explain it. “Sally was very afraid of being dumped by Albert and having to go back and work as a waitress,” she says. “And I’m sure the reason Albert never divorced her was because he would have had to give her half his assets.”
IN BEARSVILLE, GROSSMAN at least had the consolation of knowing his studio was thriving. “It was a Who’s Who of recording artists,” recalled Peter Cantine, who worked at the Bear as a teenager. “We’d get a phone call saying, ‘We’ll take four shrimp cocktails and four bottles of Piper-Heidsieck to go.’ It was a whole different world.” Run like a boot camp by ex-marine Griff McCree, Bearsville became a destination studio for acts that wanted seclusion and fresh air. “A lot of people went to Bearsville to record simply because it wasn’t Manhattan,” says Kasim Sulton. “You could concentrate on your work and not worry about the phone ringing.”
Thanks to McCree, Grossman’s relationship with the studio was essentially hands-off. “He’d come up once in a while, but the younger guys on the staff were encouraged to avoid him,” says Mark McKenna. “It was like, ‘Don’t interact with Albert—you’ll say something stupid and get into trouble.’ They had a camera on the driveway so we could see when he was coming, and everybody was supposed to look busy when he did.”
One act that used Bearsville regularly was funk-soul institution the Isley Brothers, who owned a nearby cabin they used as a base for hunting. “I think they liked the studio because they could doodle around and nobody would be any the wiser,” says John Holbrook, who began engineering for the group on 1977’s aptly titled Go for Your Guns. “They were always five hours late. The three younger guys worked out the tunes, and then the older brothers would come in and argue and mess around with the lyrics.” In the age of P-Funk and Earth, Wind & Fire, the brothers loved the sound Holbrook got for them in Studio B. “There was a polyrhythmic funk between the drums, the popping bass, and the guitar and keyboard parts,” he says. “For me the thing was to keep the impact of the rhythmic attack, so my approach was to keep everything super-clean.”**
At times the atmosphere on the brothers’ sessions got more fractious. “They were big scary guys, and they’d be yelling at each other,” Holbrook says. Biggest and scariest of all was Rudolph Isley, who was rumored to carry a revolver in his briefcase. “One time they’re at Bearsville, and there’s a big row,” says Holbrook. “We see Rudy storming into the control room and going for the briefcase. And he opens it and takes out . . . a cassette!” When Todd Rundgren clipped Isley’s El Dorado as he bombed down Mink Hollow Road in his new SUV, Rudolph was incensed. “I called Cindy Cashdollar and told her what happened,” says Paul Mozian. “She said, ‘Rudy’s not very happy.’ Two days later the Isleys were in Studio B, and they saw me coming down the hallway. Rudy said, ‘D’you know Paul Mozian?’ I said, ‘I think I saw him back there.’”
Bearsville’s boot-camp atmosphere abated somewhat after Grossman fired Griff McCree. “When Griff went, we all said to Albert, ‘Why can’t we talk to you? What’s the big deal?’” says Mark McKenna. “And he said, ‘Oh, I dunno.’ Eventually the younger guys got to be friendly with him.” Grossman thawed still further after agreeing that Studio A should become a proper recording room. “The acoustics became legendary,” says Holbrook, who baffled the room’s sound with packing blankets. “Within a few days Paul Cypert put in these diffusion things I’d designed on a napkin, sort of like a boat. It was just luck that it worked out.”
“Holbrook was a genius,” says Mark McKenna. “He set up the studio and completely revolutionized it. When the whole drum-sound sampler thing was happening in the eighties, we had it better than anybody else.” Producers such as Rhett Davies and Bob Clearmountain began block-booking Bearsville. After Simple Minds came to mix 1985’s Once Upon a Time there, singer Jim Kerr was asked if he liked the studio. “I guess we must,” he replied. “The last time we were supposed to come for five days and stayed five weeks.” Grossman was delighted. “He loved the action,” says McKenna. “He’d come in and shoot the breeze with Chrissie Hynde. It was hard to get close to him, but in general there was a lot of affection going both ways.”
As reenergized as Grossman felt by the studio, he was rapidly losing what interest he still had in his label. Rundgren, Butterfield, and Willie Mitchell had gone. Foghat wasn’t selling anymore, and Randy Vanwarmer hadn’t followed up “Just When I Needed You Most.” “I had the feeling Warner Brothers were frustrated, because the label wasn’t delivering,” says Mark McKenna. “Bearsville was doing stuff nobody gave a shit about. They did some very weird things. At one point Krasnow sent in this thing by an act called the Human Body.”
The latter’s Make You Shake It (1983)—the last album released on the label—was actually the work of funk eccentric Roger Troutman, who decided to make a visit to Bearsville. “We spent a couple of hours in the studio with him,” McKenna says. “He’d never seen an AMS sampler before, so that blew his mind. Then Albert said, ‘Let’s go get some lunch.’ We’re walking into the Bear, and all of a sudden Troutman stops and goes, ‘Do they let coons in here?’”
As Bearsville Records limped on, Grossman increasingly left the hard work to Steve Constant, the label’s financial controller. Mark McKenna says the workaholic Constant would always be at his desk, “no matter what time I arrived at the studio or what time I drove home.” But the busiest hive of Bearsville industry was the accounting office, whose job it was to collect royalties trickling in from deals Grossman had made all over the world. “There were about five accountants working for him,” McKenna says. “I guess he needed them just to keep track of it all and call people to say, ‘Where’s the money?’”
In 1981 the accountants were asked to assist Grossman’s lawyers in a $450,000 lawsuit he’d brought against Bob Dylan for nonpayment of royalty commission. In response, Dylan stopped paying his ex-manager altogether and filed eighteen counterclaims, arguing that Grossman had “exploited and mismanaged” him from the get-go. “Albert’s only comment to me was that he just wanted what he was entitled to contractually,” Sally Grossman said in diplomatically 1987.** She added that Dylan had recently called her, offering to settle. The following year, Dylan paid the Grossman estate $2 million.
Aside from Roger Troutman, the very last acts signed to Bearsville were Nicole Wills, the Saugerties-based NRBQ, and neo-powerpop band the dBs. “I’d loved Bearsville’s output over the years,” dBs leader Peter Holsapple recalled. “Todd Rundgren . . . was a huge influence on [drummer] Will Rigby and me as teenagers, and I’d even sewed the Bearsville logo on to my book bag when I was sick at home with mononucleosis in the tenth grade.” But producer Chris Butler encountered only indifference when he enthusiastically pitched his vision for the dBs’ Like This to Albert Grossman. “After listening to me silently for a while,” Butler recalled, “he stopped me mid-sentence and said in a rather nasal baritone, ‘Chris, all I am interested in these days is restaurants and wood.’” Like This was barely out when Warners terminated its relationship with Bearsville, and the album’s distribution ceased overnight. “You couldn’t get it in the stores when we were touring with R.E.M.,” said Holsapple, “so it was all kind of distressing.”
Wills’s Tell Me was a mechanical-sounding album of cover versions—including Rundgren’s “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference”—that was left similarly high and dry. Tell Me’s last track, “Never Take the Place of You,” was a song by Al Anderson of NRBQ, whose Grooves in Orbit was released by Bearsville in 1983. After the band clashed with Grossman over the song “Daddy-O,” he refused to release further singles from the album or to let them go. “Barry Feinstein said to me, ‘Albert was always trying to get the best deal, and he best-dealed himself out of the business,’” says Mark McKenna. “I thought that was a great line.” In a last desperate move, Grossman turned to none other than Rundgren. “Albert announced that he was making him head of A&R, which was very awkward for Ian Kimmet,” says McKenna. “I don’t know if it was an attempt to breathe new life into the label, but Todd became an A&R figure, which was totally out of character. I don’t think it lasted more than a couple of months.”
After Bearsville Records folded in 1984, Grossman was at something of a loose end. Musician later described him rather fancifully as “rock and roll’s Citizen Kane,” roaming alone through the halls of a rural Xanadu. “One time near the end, Albert and I went for dinner in New York with Krasnow and Barry Feinstein,” says Ian Kimmet. “Krasnow asked me, ‘So what are you doing up there, Ian?’ And I said, ‘Not very much. Barry drives Albert down here, and I drive him back.’ And Albert and Barry just cracked up. Bob didn’t know where to look, and we all just started eating again. But it was almost true.” In 1985, Grossman asked Kimmet if he wanted to run the studio. “I said I needed a break, and he was upset,” Kimmet says. “I said, ‘I think I’m gonna try something else.’” When Kimmet left Woodstock for a new life in Nashville, Grossman experienced it as the latest in a long series of abandonments.
As detached as he’d become, Grossman was still trying to pull deals together; it was like a muscle memory for him. He even retrieved the Professor Longhair sessions Michael Friedman had recorded over a decade earlier. “He had me rough-mix all the songs,” says Mark McKenna. “I spent a couple of days on them, drove up to his house, and gave him the cassettes.” To McKenna’s mild amazement, Grossman told him he wanted to resurrect Bearsville in a new deal with Capitol-EMI Music president Bhaskar Menon.
IN JANUARY 1986, Grossman prepared to make his usual trip to Cannes for MIDEM. On the eve of his departure, he went with Ronnie Lyons to the first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel. “Albert said, ‘Krasnow’s having a rock and roll dinner, ya wanna go?’” Lyons says. “Everybody was in black tie, but Albert and I were in Mexican shirts. The only person who didn’t look at us like we were crazy was Ray Charles.”
The following day, the two men were driven to Kennedy Airport. “We were laughing and telling jokes,” says Lyons. “We were going to get together when we got back. He said he wanted me to run the studio.” While Lyons flew to Mexico to travel through Central America with Sally, Grossman flew Concorde to London to meet Krasnow and other music-biz cronies. “They were having a Super Bowl party at the Savoy,” Lyons says. “Albert said, ‘I’ve been waiting thirty years for the [Chicago] Bears to get to the Super Bowl.’”
Next morning, Ronnie and Sally were woken in their Mexico City hotel room by a phone call from Krasnow: a flight attendant had been unable to wake Grossman on the flight. When the Concorde landed at Heathrow, the Cumulus Nimbus was pronounced dead from a heart attack.
Woodstock went into shock. Though Grossman hadn’t looked after himself, no one expected him to die at the age of fifty-nine. “It was super-devastating to me,” says Peter Yarrow, who rarely returned to the place he and his manager had put on the musical map. “I let my cabin in Woodstock go to rack and ruin. It was just too painful to go back there.”
At the memorial service in Bearsville, which Yarrow organized, friends and clients were inconsolable. “Artie Traum was sitting in front of us and just sobbing,” says Mark McKenna. “A lot of people were like that.” Dean Schambach says, “There were real tears shed, because Albert really connected with you on a deep level.” Some, however, were unmoved by the eulogy given by Robbie Robertson. “He blew my mind,” says John Simon. “He said, ‘In this life we have teachers.’ And I thought, ‘Wait a minute, what in the world did Albert teach you?’ What he taught him was how to be a ruthless businessman.” Rick Danko, however, found it hard to summon the bitterness that Simon and others felt for Grossman. “All this stuff that Albert perhaps didn’t tell me about, I didn’t really hold it against him,” he told me in 1995. “The man had to do what the man had to do. I hope he’s happy wherever he may be.”
A stone’s throw from the restaurant, Grossman was already in the ground, buried in a grave dug by Paul Cypert against the town’s express orders. “They said he couldn’t be buried there,” says Ed Sanders. “They said they would freeze him for six months while they decided where to put him. The family just said, ‘Go to hell.’ He had a nice, shiny-topped coffin, a huge thing, and they just plopped him down there.” Standing at the graveside, John Storyk glanced around him. “It was winter, and there were no leaves,” he says. “I looked around, and virtually every building I could see, Albert owned. And I’d either built them or renovated them.”
There were conspicuous absentees. Ian Kimmet was in Nashville. Levon Helm was too nauseated by the thought of Robertson’s homage to attend. “I ran into Levon once in the studio, and he couldn’t even say Albert’s name,” Sally Grossman said in 2014. Inevitably there was no sign of Bob Dylan, whose rise to superstardom might have been very different without Grossman. But the most stinging verdict of all came from Todd Rundgren. “He got what he deserved,” the former Runt said to Kasim Sulton. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Thirty years after his death, Albert Grossman continues to elicit ambivalent feelings from those who knew him. “There was Albert the businessman and Albert the guy, and I liked them both,” says Michael Friedman. “He never yelled at me once; he always treated me with respect.”
But Barbara O’Brien, the woman who salvaged the career of Levon Helm, speaks for many in her very different view. “Maybe Albert was a wise businessman, but I think he’s the model for what managers shouldn’t do,” she says. “I was a pit bull for Levon, but there are ways to do it so you don’t piss everybody off. Albert wanted to be as big as Dylan or Janis were, and he took too much from them. The guy was an empire, but his personality stopped you from wanting to embrace it.”
No one has ever summed up the puzzle of Albert Grossman better than Mary Travers, one of his first real stars. “He wasn’t a very nice man,” she told Dylan biographer Bob Spitz, “but I loved him dearly.”
* Ian Kimmet also recalls Feinstein and Grossman chuckling after their initial exposure to Dylan’s first Christian album Slow Train Coming.
* In 1980, the Brothers recorded tracks for a “live” album at Bearsville, the intention being to add crowd noise after the fact. Columbia rejected Wild in Woodstock, which finally saw the light of day in 2015 as one of the twenty-three CDs that made up The RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters, 1959–1983.
* Though Albert did once remark to Ian Kimmet that “Bob is not a nice guy.”