Sometimes I walk through town and look at all these places where I used to play or get laid, and part of me thinks they must still be there. But they’re not.
—Graham “Monk” Blackburn
IN ONE OF the Elliott Landy images that hang in the foyer of the Bearsville theatre, Albert Grossman is grinning affectionately at Janis Joplin. The iconography of Woodstock is all around us as we await a performance by Rickie Lee Jones. The audience is late-middle-aged and shabbily affluent in pastel colors and jeans and fleeces. I’m guessing there aren’t many Republicans here. Ninety minutes later, Jones rounds off her set with a rendering of “The Weight,” dedicated to what she terms “all the Woodstockings” in the tasteful 250-seat venue. There can’t be many more pleasant nights out in North America than an early dinner at the Bear followed by a show in the venue that would have been Grossman’s pride and joy.
The fact that the theatre opened at all, three years after Grossman’s death, was testament to the resolve of his widow—as well as to John Storyk—to see it through to completion. “I’d promised Albert we’d finish it,” Storyk says. “When the dust had settled, I finished the parking lot and got all the paperwork done by the end of that summer.” Meanwhile Paul Cypert completed an ambitious double-helix staircase in the theatre, and David Boyle put in a fireplace based on the hearth at George Washington’s headquarters in Newburgh. “Sally sold Warhol’s Double Elvis to pay for it all,” says Mark McKenna. “She sank about three-quarters of a million dollars into it to get it open. She’d talk about Albert’s dream—whatever that was, because he never told anybody.”
The Bearsville Theatre, October 2013 (Art Sperl)
For a few years after it opened in July 1989—with a concert by Happy Traum—the theatre’s programming switched between theatre and live music. “Albert had a vision for the place,” says JoHanna Hall, who served on its ad hoc board of directors. “We got together and brainstormed about how to make it into a going concern, but it all came to naught.” Subsequent plans to make the theatre a loss leader for a small hotel in the Petersen House building next door were blocked by Sally herself. “Every time they got to the altar,” says Hall, “she bolted.” Michael Lang thinks Sally “felt obligated to keep things going, but it was a bit of a white elephant . . . and eventually too much for her.” JoHanna Hall lays out the central problem that’s beset the theatre ever since: “You need to bring in acts you can’t see every day in town, but because it’s such a small theatre you can’t really pay an Emmylou Harris to play there. The two theatres at either end of town could have been the bookends for something international and certainly national. But where was the person, once Albert was gone, to make that happen?”
THE HOLE LEFT in the Woodstock community by Grossman’s death was immense. “When he was up there, it was an incubator,” says Mark McKenna. “It was sort of like the Laurel Canyon of the East Coast. And then after he passed, it just started to diminish.” JoHanna Hall agrees: “A lot died with Albert. Things began to fray. There wasn’t a nightlife. You’d go into town and it would be shut down.”
Though Sally Grossman stepped up to the plate in Bearsville, she was soon antagonizing the very people trying to help her. “I love her,” says Peter Yarrow. “She has a lot of Albert’s insight and wisdom, but she also has a lot of his terseness and dismissiveness.” Ian Kimmet, who returned from Nashville in 1988 to work for her, soon found himself on the receiving end of both those traits. Grossman also fired a number of people who worked for her. “She threw Sha Wu out of the Little Bear, and I have no idea why,” says Ronnie Lyons, whose own relationship with her did not survive the relocation to Bearsville.
Another Bearsville employee who felt the heat of Sally’s wrath was Steve Constant, who still owned a stake in Bearsville Records. “She cut Steve out of her life,” says Kimmet. But Constant knew something other insiders did not: that Grossman’s nonprobated will would have prevented Sally gaining control of any assets beyond his residencies and personal affects. One clause stipulated that the theatre and surrounding properties should not pass into her ownership. “She said to me, ‘The day of Albert’s funeral, Steve was trying to get me to sign papers!’” Kimmet says. “He was telling her she had to give him power of attorney. She said, ‘Get the fuck away from me!’ And she never did sign them.” Another vexing legal matter was that of Grossman’s former partner Bennett Glotzer. “Glotzer had cut himself in for a piece of everything,” recalls Ronnie Lyons. “Sally said to me, ‘What, I’m gonna have to pay Bennett for the rest of my life now?’”
Kimmet took seven more years of Sally Grossman before quitting the music business altogether. On a drive to St. Tropez while they were attending MIDEM, she told him she felt like a failure. Says Kimmet today, “I didn’t have much to say to that.”
Driven almost as crazy by Sally Grossman was Bearsville Theatre manager Dan Griffin. He too fell out of favor with her, though not before booking a series of shows whose primary purpose was to supplement the meager income of Rick Danko. “It was a bit puzzling that Sally always made the calls for Rick,” Griffin recalled. “I came to learn that every time he was tight on money he would play the theatre, and that happened about once a month.”
Joining Danko at Bearsville were some of the singer-songwriters who’d moved to the Woodstock area after its halcyon days. One evening, Jules Shear and Marshall Crenshaw arrived at the theatre for a “songwriters’ circle” of the kind that had become popular at New York’s Bitter End. The problem was that there was no sign of Danko, forcing them to start the show without him. “Suddenly the engineer signals that Rick is on the telephone,” Griffin remembered. “He says hello to us all and proceeds to tell us—on air—a hilarious story of how he’d been driving to the station when he hit a deer on one of Woodstock’s mountain roads.”
“We were wondering if Rick would ever show,” says Crenshaw. “And then he came lumbering in with a six-pack in his hand, and I thought, ‘Okay, here we go.’ But then he sat down, and it was a six-pack of ginger ale, and he offered me one. Instantly I just really dug him.”
Like Garth Hudson, Danko had been roped into a Bearsville session for the 1987 solo debut by his former bandmate Robbie Robertson. Signed to a generous deal by David Geffen, Robertson spent a huge amount of money on a set of bloated and overproduced songs that included the Richard Manuel tribute “Fallen Angel.” “I think the record cost a million bucks,” says Mark McKenna. “When Bob Clearmountain mixed it, he had a hell of a time just arranging it so he could hear everything.” Naturally, Levon Helm was nowhere to be seen during the Bearsville overdubs for “Fallen Angel” and “Sonny Got Caught in the Moonlight.”
Jules Shear had his own mini-adventure with Danko after offering songs to the Band for their first album since the departure of Robertson and the suicide of Manuel. “Rick I got along with better than anyone else in the group,” Shear says. “He seemed to have the most grasp on the fact that you actually had to write the song. He even came to my house a couple of times to write.” Paul Mozian confirms that Danko “could be very off-putting with his shenanigans” but was genuinely committed to keeping the Band together. “He’d say, ‘Hey, you gotta pay the rent,’” Mozian says. “Whereas for Levon it would be, ‘If Garth’s willing to do it, I’m willing to do it.’”
Sitting in with the reconstituted Band—the lineup comprising Helm, Danko, and Hudson with Jim Weider, drummer Randy Ciarlante, and keyboardist Stan Szelest—Shear soon got the measure of the boss man. “Levon says, ‘Jules, I really wanna talk to you in private,’” Shear remembers. “When everybody goes, he starts explaining to me how Robbie ripped him off and how he wants to split everything between me and the guys in the Band. So it would be one-seventh mine and six-sevenths to the other guys.” Shear’s manager, Mike Lembo, politely told Helm where he could stick it. In the end, the only song of Shear’s that made it on to Jericho (1993) was “Too Soon Gone,” a tribute to Manuel that started life as a piano doodle by Stan Szelest. “And then one night I came home, and I got a call from Rick telling me Stan was dead,” says Shear. “So a tribute to Richard became a tribute to Stan as well.” Szelest’s replacement in the new Band was former Full Tilt member Richard Bell.** “He had this huge sound, so Garth could just do his thing,” says Jim Weider. “After Jericho the Band did really well. Everyone was in good physical shape. But then we did High on the Hog, and everything started to decline.”
Like Shear, Marshall Crenshaw was something of a fish out of water in Woodstock, which he’d first visited when Ian Kimmet tried to sign him to Bearsville. “It was a freezing-ass winter, and the place was buried in snow, but I really dug it,” he says, sitting in the yard of his home in Rhinecliff. “My wife and I came up and saw this beautiful house on eighteen acres off Tinker Street, and I could rent it for less than half of what I was paying for my duplex in the East Village.” Moving into the house in early 1987, Crenshaw began an ambivalent relationship with the town. “The place didn’t seem to have any kind of identity,” he says. “You couldn’t tell what had happened there.” As time passed, he became increasingly disenchanted. “There’s a provincialism there,” he says. “Just being in this isolated place could turn you into a zombie. I started to call it ‘the Woodstock Glaze.’ But I guess we loved it too. When we moved away, we felt nostalgic for it.”
Equally ambivalent was British import Graham Parker, who—like many—moved to the area because he didn’t want to raise a child in the city. “For me there wasn’t any premeditation about a music community,” he says. “When I go to a party and guitars come out, a feeling of dread comes over me.” Worse still for Parker was the “benefit fatigue” that afflicted so many Woodstock musicians. “Whenever I’d go to the Grand Union supermarket, somebody would come up and say, ‘Hey, Graham! We’re doing a benefit for the sewers!’” he says with an English chortle. “I’m not sure I ever got paid for playing there.”**
When Parker recorded 1991’s Struck by Lightning at West Hurley’s Dreamland studios, he asked John Sebastian, Garth Hudson, and Orleans’s Larry Hoppen to play on it. “I had the Woodstock experience without going into the actual town,” he says. Mixing the album at Chris Andersen’s Nevessa studio—located in the Artist Road house where Jim Colegrove and N. D. Smart II had once lived—Parker had Hudson overdub organ and accordion on three tracks. “I wanted him on at least five, but it didn’t quite work out like that,” he says. “In the end I wasn’t even thinking about the money I was losing. There’s a bit Garth played in ‘Kid with a Butterfly Net’ that still sends shivers down my spine. It’s like the angels come down and touch you.” At one point Hudson fell fast asleep on a couch. “We sort of crept around, and I think we brought in some tuna fish,” Parker says. “Garth woke up to the smell of food and went, ‘Who are all these women?!’ And it was just me and Chris in the room.”
An Englishman in upstate New York: Graham Parker’s Struck by Lightning (1991), featuring the genius of Garth Hudson
Parker also befriended—and toured with—Rick Danko in the early nineties, not long after opening for the Band at Kingston’s UPAC theatre. “It was awesome to do ‘Watch the Moon Come Down’ and hear him doing background vocals way up there with that feathery angelic vocal,” he says. “But the rehearsals were terribly sloppy. He’d turn up late, and the bass wouldn’t work. At our first gig at the Bearsville Theatre, people were walking in during the sound check. I thought, ‘This is so fucking unprofessional. We’re not in the sixties now.’”
When I met Danko in London in 1995, his life had become a train wreck. Six years earlier he had suffered the loss of Eli, his son by his first marriage. He was surviving on bar gigs and sporadic royalty payments. “I get paid for ‘This Wheel’s on Fire,’” he told me. “I wish I’d had a few more of them.” He had even fewer after Robbie Robertson bought out his publishing, an ill-advised example of short-term thinking that Helm—as a matter of belligerent principle—avoided. In 1997 Danko was arrested in a Tokyo hotel after receiving an envelope of heroin mailed to him by his wife, Elizabeth. Evicted from a farmhouse off Route 212, just outside Woodstock en route to Saugerties, the Dankos were forced to move into a motel near Kingston.
“My last recollection of Rick was on the Labor Day weekend of 1999,” says Robbie Dupree. “I was sitting in with John Hall’s band. There’d been a comedy of errors, and Danko came pretty high. He opened up his guitar case, and it was empty. Yet at the end of the day, John said, ‘Let’s have Rick come up, and let’s do an encore.’ I said, ‘What do you wanna do?’ So we played ‘The Shape I’m In’ and it actually was good. I remember him standing a little bit forward and singing it really good. And there was just this moment where he looked over at me, and it was like he got in touch with better times for that moment.”
On December 10, after a short tour of the Midwest, Danko was found dead in his bedroom in Marbletown, near Kingston. “He ended the way he came into it,” says Jonathan Donahue. “He was a mess, as innocent as the day is long, a country boy, a child.” Danko was just three weeks shy of his fifty-seventh birthday.
WHEN I MET Donahue and Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak for lunch in Woodstock in May 1998, they had just completed the fourth Mercury Rev album. Yet they already seemed resigned to its commercial failure, since 1995’s intoxicating See You on the Other Side had died an unwarranted death and they’d been dropped by Beggars Banquet Records.
But there was something different about their new one, released by Virgin offshoot V2, and it had more than a little to do with the fact that Levon Helm and Garth Hudson were playing on it—Helm drumming on “Opus 40,” Hudson playing saxes on (what else) “Hudson Line,” both tracks steeped in the magic of the Catskills. “There were people who were very nonplussed that we were working with them,” Donahue told me. “Well, I like people from that era. You go to the source; you don’t go to somebody who says they can play like Levon.”
“Levon would be sneaking off to the bathroom now and then, but it made no difference to his playing,” Grasshopper recalls. “Garth was harder. He’d bring out one horn and play a few notes, and then he’d play another horn and play some other notes. It was all in his head. And after an hour, all the parts fit together into this melody line. We were flabbergasted. It was like, ‘How did he do that?’”
“Opus 40” from the classic Deserter’s Songs (1998)
Deserter’s Songs was an album filled with haunting refrains: “How does that old song go?” Donahue sang on the opening “Holes.” Quaintly exotic non-rock sounds—of harps, bowed saws, flugelhorns—offered beguiling backdrops to sweet, almost fragile vocal lines. Coming after the bluster of grunge and the posturing of Britpop, it tapped a new nerve in pop’s collective psyche. To the amazement of all in Rev’s world, it was voted in several polls—including the NME’s—as the album of the year. The front-parlor feel was still there on 2001’s All Is Dream, but this time the mood was darker, more steeped in Donahue’s occult obsessions. Here lurked serpents, monsters surfacing from the depths of nightmares.
With 2005’s The Secret Migration, the Rev made their most pastoral album to date: a “dark country ride” through the seasons of the Catskills, a hymn to nature’s mysteries in the face of materialist artifice. Sadly, Mercury Rev’s moment had passed: the fad for Deserter’s Songs’ spectral neo-Americana was over. “The Secret Migration pastoralized its way right into the budget bin,” says Donahue. “A lot of people who’d been listening tuned out.”
A decade on, Donahue and Grasshopper remain proud Kingstonians with mixed feelings toward their famous neighbor. “Woodstock looks at us like we’re the dirty half sister,” says Jonathan, picking at a plate of fries in Kingston’s ancient Hoffman House. “There are a lot of well-meaning people there, but it’s not a clear picture to say that Woodstock is this fountain of well-being. In a way it’s very much a self-cherishing self-preservation: ‘We’ll let the outside world run its course, but here we’ll make sure there’s no McDonald’s.’” Ironically, Kingston is now semi-hip in a way that Woodstock may never be again, attracting as it does a spillover of middle-class twenty-somethings who can no longer afford to live in New York City. “The hipsters here are interested in Woodstock, and they know where Dylan crashed his motorcycle,” Grasshopper says. “But a lot of them hang out in places like Phoenicia, because Woodstock is too tie-dyed and hippie-touristy.”
The same goes for the offspring of Woodstock’s original hippies. “Because the town is so famous for what it was and what it’s traded off, it becomes hard for the younger generation to turn it into something else,” says Tony Fletcher, a British writer who lives in Phoenicia. “The venues aren’t there, and the ones that survive are those dominated by open mic nights with older guys doing bluegrass. The bigger question is: Does music still play the same role for the younger generation?”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but this is not Seattle,” says Simone Felice, whose side project, the Duke & the King, recorded its 2009 album Nothing Gold Can Stay in a Bearsville cabin. “There aren’t seven or eight amazing bands playing in Woodstock. The decline of the Bearsville-style studio has occurred during my own ten years as an artist. That’s been part of what’s driven people into their own spaces. It’s more about people hiding away. We’re in the woods here.”
Grasshopper dates the dawning of a new curiosity about Woodstock to the 1985 release of Bob Dylan’s career-spanning box set Biograph. “There was all this interest in the Basement Tapes and Bearsville studios,” the guitarist says. “And then later, after R.E.M. and Nick Cave recorded up there, it gave the place a new credibility. People wanted to go see Big Pink.”
R.E.M.’s use of Bearsville to record tracks for Green (1988)—and for the consciously “pastoralized” albums Out of Time (1991) and Automatic for the People (1992)—was certainly a high watermark in the studio’s life. “At the time of Albert’s passing, Sally wasn’t a very significant presence in the life of the studio,” Mark McKenna said. “None of us was really sure what would happen next. But then she got gradually more involved, and it just went on. And there was a big blossoming in the late eighties.”
The initial omens weren’t great. When Ronnie Lyons took over the running of the studio—as per Alpert’s wishes—he alienated the majority of the staff. “Ronnie was the kiss of death,” says John Holbrook. “He had no feel for anything. People said he was just looking after Sally. He drove everybody away, including me. Bob Clearmountain said, ‘I’m never working in this fucking studio again.’” For his part, Lyons claims Bearsville had its biggest year to date on his watch. “It had an SSL board in the smaller room, and Clearmountain was there all the time,” he says. “I had Chris Kimsey in for three and a half months with the Psychedelic Furs.” Eventually Lyons was ousted by Steve Constant and Peter Hoffman, a fellow executor of Grossman’s estate and later the husband of Susan Lee.
Mark McKenna deserves much of the credit for Bearsville’s resurgence. “I took out an ad in Billboard,” he says. “It was an aerial shot of the studio, and it said, ‘Would you believe that five of the albums in the Hot 100 were recorded in this building?’ Because it was just a place in the woods. I told Sally we needed to create a brochure for the studio, and we got Milton Glaser to do it. On the first page he put ‘The Magic of Woodstock.’”
By the time McKenna returned in 1992 from a few years in Los Angeles, “Bearsville” was synonymous with a particular kind of away-from-it-all studio. “You had to want to be in a place where ideas could coalesce,” he says. “R.E.M. did those two albums, and Dave Matthews did Under the Table and Dreaming in 1994. Jeff Buckley did Grace there.” Bearsville was even used by rapper Nas, thrash-metal deities Metallica, and Björk-fronted Scandi oddballs the Sugarcubes.
The studio’s burgeoning popularity coincided with moves to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Woodstock festival—this time at Winston Farm, the Saugerties site first proposed for the original Music & Art Fair. Once again Michael Lang met with muted fear and loathing from Woodstock’s town board, who dreaded a mass invasion. “They were very paranoid,” Lang says. “I kept saying, ‘Look, no one will be coming here; everybody will be going there.’ And of course, nobody showed up in town, and the business community was upset by it. But they should have embraced it.”
On the weekend of August 12–14, 1994, over three hundred thousand people descended on Winston Farm in what turned out—after rains that made the 1969 downpour look like a passing shower—to be a mass mud bath. Lang and his partners had scheduled a mix of high-testosterone nineties bands and veterans of Max Yasgur’s Farm. Orleans, the Band, and John Sebastian represented Woodstock itself, while Santana, Joe McDonald, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Lang’s client Joe Cocker dusted themselves down to rekindle the spirit of ’69. On two stages, Metallica, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Cypress Hill, and Red Hot Chili Peppers braved the elements. More elderly entities included Traffic, Aerosmith, the Allman Brothers, Peter Gabriel, and—giving multimedia performances in an area dubbed “the Surreal Field”—Todd Rundgren.
But Lang’s biggest coup was persuading Bob Dylan, at long last, to play Woodstock. “The fact that he played and the Band played had some reflection back on the town,” says Lang, who doesn’t pretend that Woodstock ’94 matched the Aquarian vibes of its world-shaking predecessor. Among the songs Dylan sang on the closing evening were “All Along the Watchtower” and—rather more passionately—“I Shall Be Released.” He was performing the latter song just a few miles from the pink box where it had first been recorded in the far-off summer of 1967.
Twenty years after Woodstock ’94, Michael Lang sits in Tinker Street eatery Oriole 9 and takes stock of the place that etched his name in pop-culture history. “Woodstock’s roots have endured,” he tells me. “It’s still a haven for artists and musicians, and people still leave you alone. There are lots of places where people can record, even if there are no major studios anymore. The club scene has diminished, but I think there’s a basis for some sort of renaissance up here.”
Lang speaks of opening a $10 million music college in the building that formerly housed Zena Elementary School in partnership with Paul Green, founder of the original School of Rock and latterly of the Paul Green Rock Academy near Saugerties. “That could change things,” comments Karl Berger, who’s been invited to participate. “We’ve had some talks with Michael and Paul, and they do want to have it broad enough for us to be engaged as sort of devil’s advocates.”
Not everybody agrees there is a “basis for a renaissance” in Woodstock. Since the 1994 festival, the town has all but ossified into a musicians’ retirement home. “When Albert moved up, there was actually a butcher and a cobbler and there were tradespeople in the town,” says Jim Rooney. “Now you can’t get anything—there’s nothing there but knickknack shops.” While Rooney’s old friends Happy and Jane Traum have carved out the lucrative niche that is their instructional-video business Homespun Tapes, there is no longer a live music scene to speak of. Even in the nineties, when Radio Woodstock became a regional flagship for alternative rock, few bands beyond Shivaree and the Push Stars made more than local waves. “When I programmed music for the Bearsville Theatre, I was able to bring in Astrud Gilberto and Lindsay Buckingham, Phil Woods, Boozoo Chavis,” says Mark McKenna. “It was totally eclectic and provided a focal point for music in the area. But the actual native music scene? Nothing was happening.”
There were also ongoing drug problems in town. “I studied the heroin epidemic here,” says Ed Sanders, who covered it for his Woodstock Journal. “I wanted dealers to promise not to sell to kids, because there were a bunch of overdoses in the nineties. It just came up from the city on the Trailways buses. There was always a dealer in town. We had a guy right near the Art Supply store, and he was impervious.”**
Not only did the great live venues close, but even the Bearsville studio fell victim to the vicissitudes of the music industry in the digital era. “People couldn’t afford the rates, which were something like $2,500 a day,” says Ian Kimmet. “Seymour Stein said, ‘I can’t pay that, Sally.’ She said to me, ‘What the fuck are we gonna do?’” In 2004, she sold the studio building—together with all its audio equipment—for the knockdown price of $725,000. “Woodstock became a sleepy town,” says Jim Weider. “The music scene was shifting.” As far back as August 1991, Artie Traum told me his fellow musicians had replaced drugs with health foods. “Most of the ones I know are in bed by ten thirty,” he’d said. “They do jobs, and they’re sober.” In a review of a Band show that year, the Woodstock Times argued that the town was “a pariah in the music industry at this point.”
Billboard ad for Radio Woodstock, summer 1981
With the diminishing of the place as an incubator of actual music, Woodstock slowly reached an uneasy truce between its resistance to change and its powerlessness in the face of rising property values. By the late nineties, a new crowd of affluent urban scenesters was pouring in, many of them claiming it was precisely Woodstock’s down-home character they treasured. After 9/11, the flood only increased. “We had a ton of people moving up out of the city,” says Richard Heppner. “Second-home prices went through the roof. And that’s kind of where we are now. There’s not much you can do about it.”
“When Albert died, it took the wind out of me for a while,” says John Storyk. “And what I saw after that was not as interesting to me. It was a depressing mix of leftover hippies and New Yorker yuppies. I didn’t see any real music coming out of Woodstock.” For Robbie Dupree, Woodstock used to be a place where you came to realize your dreams; now “you have to have had your dream already to come here.” Those who’ve had their dreams include A-list celebs from David Bowie to Daniel Craig. And yet there’s still a “funkiness” to Woodstock that will never exist in Rhinebeck. “If you want to paint your house purple, you can,” Heppner says. “Woodstock still maintains that independence, and God forbid you try to legislate it.” Ed Sanders, who chaired the committee that rewrote Woodstock’s zoning laws in 1988 and 1989, says that in thirty years the town will still “look somewhat the same”—and still be McDonald’s-free.
“I don’t think the Woodstock spirit is ever going to change,” says Tony Fletcher. “It’s a liberal, progressive community that understands the history of the town. There will come a point when the vast majority of the people from the sixties are no longer with us, but I don’t see that spirit changing. The Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one on the town board.” For Milton Glaser, whose wife inadvertently triggered the town’s rock revolution in the first place, there is still an “unspoiled bucolic sweetness” to Woodstock: “Shirley and I always compare it to our friends in the Hamptons, who are busy all the time and where the idea of a protective enclave doesn’t exist. I think that’s one of the reasons Albert went there. He hated that kind of social activity; it wasn’t natural for him. And he wasn’t impressed by people who had a lot of money.”
Along with its purple houses, however, Woodstock has settled for life as a tourist trap—and a somewhat meaningless one at that. When the summer crowds pour into town, lured by a half-digested myth of the place, the merchants who flog them T-shirts and crystals are slow to disabuse them of their illusions. “Remembering Woodstock the way it was and seeing the T-shirt shops and the pictures of Bobby all over the town,” says Peter Yarrow, “is like the selling of something precious. It’s as if the real substance has now evolved into a cartoon version of what it once was.”
“What’s the difference between Giuliani’s Times Square and Woodstock’s village green?” says Jonathan Donahue. “Not much. People wax poetic about a Woodstock that isn’t there anymore—not Deanie’s and not the Pinecrest Motel, let alone Richard Manuel’s Woodstock, which was more of a Wild West. It’s like they’re worshipping ghosts, creating devotional deities that didn’t operate the way we think they did.” Yet paradoxically it may be the tacky pathos of Woodstock that saves it. “It’s almost a caricature of what you think it ought to be,” says Tony Fletcher. “Which ultimately makes it quite authentic.” Geoff Muldaur thinks the inherent scuzziness of Woodstock’s center is exactly what redeems it. “I think it keeps the place good,” he says. “I say to Happy Traum and John Sebastian, ‘What saves this town is all those scuzzbags in the middle of it. Everybody takes one look at them and keeps going to Vermont!’”
Artist Bruce Dorfman, who taught Bob Dylan to paint in an unassuming cube of a Byrdcliffe studio, believes Woodstock is actually morphing into something that bears true witness to its artistic past. “It looks to be turning on the efforts of the Artists Association Museum,” he says. “There’s an attempt to try to get deeper about things, and that’s got to be helpful to the place.” For Dorfman, Woodstock will always be special: “It offers something more than beautiful landscape. It offers an emotional thing as well. At its best, it’s comfortable and comforting to be around people who are living their lives in a way that is somehow related to your own beliefs. It reduces the sense of isolation.”
Woodstock Times editor and bluegrass guitarist Brian Hollander struggles to think of another place where he could “do these two things the way I like doing them” and suggests I leave my last words to a 1989 song by the Texan troubadour James McMurtry:
I’m not from here, but people tell me it’s not like it used to be.
They say I should have been here back about ten years
Before it got ruined by folks like me.
* Shear had rather more fun collaborating with Ed Sanders in 2009 on a hilarious song suite entitled The Surreal Wives of Woodstock.
* John Sebastian told author Mick Brown that benefits were “the spirit” of Woodstock: “Nobody really wants to charge their friends anything when they play, but we’re always looking for excuses. The minute somebody’s loft burns down or anybody falls ill, you’ve got a benefit on your hands.”
* One summer afternoon in 1996, I was sunning myself in our Zena Road backyard when an enormous St. Bernard ambled across the lawn. When I returned the good-natured brute to its owner, in a backwoods shack off Route 212, I was confronted by a scene of appalling squalor—and a wall bedecked with images of Andy Warhol and his acolytes. The man turned out to be Factory photographer Nat Finkelstein, who’d apparently enjoyed a second wind as—in Al Aronowitz’s words—the “cocaine king” of eighties Woodstock. The St. Bernard was named Gucci.