Listen, oh don’t it get you,
Get you in your throat
—Van Morrison, “Old Old Woodstock” (1971)
IF YOU LISTEN, it all comes back. It comes full circle here on a rain-spotted night in the heart of the old Byrdcliffe art colony in New York’s Catskill Mountains, inside a small theatre built of dark cedar a hundred years ago. A son of Old Old Woodstock takes the stage with a micro-ensemble of guitarist, cellist, and fiddler and says, “We’re so happy you’ve joined us in this historic place in the woods. This is a significant mystical zone that we inhabit.”
Simone Felice is invoking our surroundings: the foothills of Overlook Mountain, a place sacred to Algonquins centuries before it became a destination and settlement for artists and craftspeople and bohemians of the early twentieth century. He is also a child of Woodstock’s musical history, the thirty-seven-year-old son of a carpenter who came to the Catskills for the 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Fair and never left.
In 2005, Felice and his brothers, Ian and James, formed a group in the mode of Bob Dylan and the Band, drawing on the woodsy influence of the “basement tapes” recorded by Dylan and his Canadian friends in a pink house due east of here in West Saugerties. Now putting the finishing touches to his second solo album, Felice—like Dylan in 1967—has turned his back on modern technology and urban overstimulation. He’s a country boy whose primarily acoustic music grows out of the land and the trees in nearby Palenville, where he and his brothers were raised. “You and I belong to the woods!” he exhorts in a song for his baby daughter, Pearl.
As he switches from strummed acoustic to a very unfancy drum kit, the handsome man with the Terence Stamp eyes morphs for a minute into the Band’s late drummer Levon Helm, with the same sparse beard and curling hair, the same shapes thrown on the drum stool. “This is a song,” he announces, “about falling madly in love with a hooker on heroin.” And thus, in an instant, do we get the dark flipside to Woodstock’s bucolic rock idyll. For as Felice also knows, this small town, housing as it did so many maverick talents, fostered a scene of damage and dysfunction that endures to this day. It pulled in all manner of wannabes and hangers-on, alcoholic philanderers, dealers in heroin and cocaine, and left at least one generation of messed-up children with no direction home.
Just a few hundred yards away from the theatre is Hi Lo Ha, the house Bob Dylan bought in the summer of 1965, where he lived for a few apparently happy years as a self-reinvented paterfamilias in spectacles and seersucker jackets. Yet Dylan himself got out while he could, removing his young family for a while to a more remote property on Ohayo Mountain Road before abandoning altogether the town that had given him succor and sanctuary.
Van Morrison was another who came for the clear mountain air and the stunning views from atop that same Ohayo Mountain. Morrison, however, recoiled at the cultural aftereffects of the Woodstock festival and went on his curmudgeonly way to Northern California. Others stayed and came to sticky ends as they sank into the hedonistic mire of Woodstock’s bars and clubs. The Band returned from a glitzy sojourn in Malibu and remained forever linked to Woodstock and its satellite hamlet, Bearsville. In 1987, a year after the group’s most soulful singer, Richard Manuel, hanged himself, transplanted Chicago harp master Paul Butterfield died of peritonitis in Los Angeles. Other Woodstock denizens perished of similarly premature causes: Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton, Jackson C. Frank, Wells Kelly, and more. The Band’s Rick Danko suffered a fatal, drug-induced heart attack in 1999. Folk legend John Herald killed himself in 2005.
Then there were the survivors. After decades of scuffling and financial disaster, Levon Helm rallied for a last wind of Woodstock life with the beloved Rambles shows staged in his wooden barn off Plochmann Lane. And perhaps it is more than cosmic coincidence that, as I sit tonight in Byrdcliffe and think of Helm reborn as Simone Felice, I’m unable to expunge from my mind an email I’ve just received from Sally Grossman—widow of the Band’s and Dylan’s old manager Albert Grossman—accusing me of taking Helm’s side in his long and fruitless war against her late husband and Band guitarist Robbie Robertson. I should be basking in the peace of Felice’s “mystical zone,” yet I sit here and feel the sting of Sally’s attack. A few days later I receive a second email from her, demanding I leave town and vowing to sue if I quote from the email.
“There’s a veil of secrecy around all this stuff,” the folk singer Artie Traum told me when I first visited Woodstock in the summer of 1991. “And for no particular reason, because there’s really nothing to hide. I don’t think there are any skeletons that aren’t already public. But one of the whole things that Dylan started was ‘Don’t talk to anybody.’”
A FEW DAYS after Felice’s Byrdcliffe show, I’m motoring slowly up a driveway that Dylan would once have known like the back of his hand. In the passenger seat is David Boyle, a cantankerous carpenter who, fifty years ago, was obliged to vacate a cottage on this very property to make way for Dylan. Having been fired by Sally Grossman some years ago, Boyle is urging me on toward the big Bearsville house her late husband bought in 1964, dismissing my fears that she will see us and call the police. “If you haven’t telephoned you are trespassing,” declared a sign that Boyle once put up for the Grossmans at the entrance. We haven’t telephoned.
“Sally has her queen of Sheba thing,” Boyle mutters at my side. “Best just to creep along.” Creep along is what I accordingly do, though I find it hard to see how it will make us any less visible to Mrs. Grossman, whose lights are clearly on in the late-afternoon twilight. As I steel myself, gripping the wheel with clammy hands, Boyle points out various landmarks of interest, including the cottage he had to give up for Dylan. Finally I exhale a giant sigh of relief as we head back down the driveway and exit the property.
SMALL TOWN TALK is the story of what happened after Albert and Sally Grossman came to Woodstock and then, on the advice of their friends Milton and Shirley Glaser, bought an estate that had belonged to illustrator John Striebel. It is simultaneously the story of what happened after Grossman’s biggest client, Bob Dylan, came to Woodstock that same year to stay in a cabin belonging to the mother of folk music star Peter Yarrow.
From the roots put down in Woodstock by Grossman and Dylan an extraordinary scene emerged and evolved over the subsequent years. It gave rise to the notion of Woodstock as countercultural touchstone, a hippie state of mind that went so far beyond the town itself that when Michael Lang had to move his 1969 festival sixty miles away, he did not for a moment consider dropping the name. And to this day, summer tourists in their thousands pour into Woodstock to find the site of the famous festival that never happened there.
NOW I’M DRIVING up to Palenville to visit Simone Felice in his very own Big Pink, a mountain-top barn with huge windows open to the woods below. The unfancy drum kit is set up in the corner, and I sit on a sofa and ask Felice about the mystical spirit of Woodstock—or, more accurately, ask him if said spirit is anything more than a pathetic fallacy.
“I got to grow up here before I had a GPS in my pocket,” he replies. “I was born in 1976 in a dilapidated house on the creek. My father got out of Queens and went to Woodstock in ’69. My folks were more just country folk hippies, as opposed to the kind trying to change the world. From the earliest time, I was always hearing Dylan, Hendrix, the Band, Van Morrison. You can feel it: there’s a mystical quality to these hills. People still come up here for the same reasons—for the quiet, for the nature, as well as the proximity to New York City and the belly of the beast. You can go out into the woods here and feel the pre-Columbian vibrations. Once you tap into it, it’s amazing. I still get teary-eyed coming home. I have friends who don’t even know where home is—spiritually or metaphorically.”
As sentimental as these words might sound, I know what Felice is talking about. I too found something in Woodstock that one might call spiritual. You could say that I bought into the received mythology of the place, based heavily on the music I associated with it before I ever set foot there: The Basement Tapes, Music from Big Pink, Moondance, Hermit of Mink Hollow. You might protest that I found only what I was already looking for: a refuge from the congestion of cities and the amplification of the modern world. Yet the day before meeting Felice I had for the thousandth time driven north along Route 375—rechristened Levon Helm Boulevard earlier that year—and felt the old heart-surging bliss as Overlook Mountain reared up to meet me, the smoky evening smells of fall seeping through the car windows. As I always do, I felt I was coming home.
“Once you get Woodstock in your blood, the temptation is to come back once in a while to check things out,” says Ed Sanders, the former Fug and Beat poet who has called the town home since 1973. “Dylan still owns property on top of Ohayo Mountain, and he stops in now and then to say hello.”
“Every summer I get this longing in my bones to be back in Woodstock, and I’ve managed to do it for three or four summers in a row,” says the folk-blues singer Maria Muldaur, who lived in the town in the early seventies. “It’s so green and so beautiful, a sort of juicy, lush green that doesn’t exist in California.”
Back in the nineties, I myself lived in Woodstock for four years, putting down roots in the town that have never quite been torn out. “Woodstock is like a Venus flytrap,” says Elliott Landy, the photographer whose images of Dylan, the Band, and Van Morrison have done much to fix Woodstock in the popular imagination. “Whether you get stuck to it or not depends on whether your vibration is in harmony with it. It’s like they say there are vortices in Sedona or Nepal, certain spiritual places, and I would say Woodstock is certainly that.”
For all my misgivings about its New Age shops and crystals and tie-dye T-shirts, I got stuck to Woodstock. And something tugged me back there again and again. Was I feeling pre-Columbian vibrations? Probably not. And yet I believe in the spirit of a place, a psychogeography that may be little more than a kind of romanticism but that enshrines something good about the people who’ve lived there.
I won’t ever forget the first pilgrimage I made to Big Pink, the unprepossessing and in fact rather small house occupied in the summer of 1967 by Dylan and the Band. I remember standing in the neighboring fields as a bootleg of their basement tapes played in my ears on a Sony Walkman. I longed to go back in time and peep through Big Pink’s windows, to watch Dylan singing “Lo and Behold” and “Million Dollar Bash” as Rick Danko and Richard Manuel yelped behind him. For me this was the perfect tableau of musical brotherhood, of songs made organically by men who’d pulled back from the insanity of fame. The ripples of those primitive recordings changed music forever.
“Woodstock has a way of downshifting you from high gears into neutral,” says Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue, that shamanic dandy of Hudson Valley rock. “It’s not a coincidence that it is a strange attractor for the Tibetans and the Zen people. The Buddhists would have a word for neutral: ‘the void.’ All of that is there, from ages earlier than Dylan. I don’t want to get too mystical about it, but there’s more to Woodstock than it being a cute little town in the mountains where Bob had a place and some funny things happened to the Band on the way to the Forum. It is that place, at least to me—the creeks and the winding roads and the pitch-black nights—but all of that is on the inside. It’s the mountains of the mind.”
While one can’t imagine the Band talking about Woodstock in such poetic terms, this book is absolutely about “the mountains of the mind”: the ease and peace, the beauty and wonder that Woodstock offered to musicians and offers still. From Dylan to David Bowie, no less—via folk singers and swamp-rockers, country pickers and free jazz composers—musicians of all kinds have called Woodstock home, a creative oasis that’s just close enough to New York City and just far enough away. “We don’t feel up here like we are just out in the woods,” says Karl Berger, founder of Woodstock’s esteemed Creative Music Studio, a hub for jazz improvisation in the seventies and eighties. “My personal viewpoint is that New York is an industrial suburb of Woodstock.”
Woodstock is hardly unique as a mystical locus of art and creativity, yet it isn’t exactly like the other picturesque spots to which artists and seekers have gravitated. “Places like Key West, Taos and Sedona, they’re unique because of where they’re situated,” says Brian Hollander, a well-liked musician who was the first Democrat to be elected Woodstock’s town supervisor (and who is the current editor of the town’s weekly newspaper). “With Woodstock it’s partly about what people have to do to survive here. It’s not a lot, but you do have to survive the winters, and sometimes it gets way down below zero. I’ve felt all along that it’s an extraordinary place, even in the anti-Woodstock years when the cultural world laughed at the hippies.”
Hollander says he recently asked the famous TV interviewer Dick Cavett if he’d ever been to Woodstock. “He said, ‘No, but I know a couple of people who went to it,’” he says with a chuckle. “But in a way it’s right that you come to Woodstock the town to find what it was that caused Michael Lang to give his festival that name—the essence of the place and the consciousness it created.”
This is what I have attempted to do in Small Town Talk. I have come back to the garden of Woodstock to understand and chronicle the remarkable music made there between the early sixties and the mid-eighties; to tell a story whose cast includes not only Dylan and the Band and Morrison but Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Karen Dalton; Bobby Charles and Paul Butterfield; Tim Hardin and Todd Rundgren; Holy Moses and Hungry Chuck; and Happy & Artie Traum and Geoff & Maria Muldaur. Most of them lived here and played and drank in such fabled establishments as the Café Espresso, the Sled Hill Café, the Village Jug, the Elephant, the Watering Troff [sic], and the legendary Joyous Lake, and ate at Deanie’s, the Squash Blossom, Rosa’s Cantina, the Bear Café, and the Little Bear.
Above all, this is a story that revolves around the larger-than-life figure of Albert Bernard Grossman, the manager, studio builder, property developer, and gourmet dubbed the Baron of Bearsville by those who loved him and those who feared him. It is Grossman’s reign, from his first visit to Woodstock in 1963 to his sudden and unexpected death in 1986, that offers the best framework for what is really a biography of Woodstock itself in its musical glory years.
For Grossman, as for Dylan and everyone else who ventured up there in his wake, Woodstock was the place that Bobby Charles—on the run from a drugs charge in Nashville—was searching for when he first showed up there in the late summer of 1971: “A place I’d feel loose / a place I could lose / these Tennessee blues. . . . ”