Hoskyns Small Town Talk

Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30977-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 360 Seiten

Think 'Woodstock' and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But Woodstock itself was over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. So why the misnomer? Quite simply, Woodstock was already a key location in the Sixties rock landscape, the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan had holed up after his 1966 motorcycle accident. In Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns recreates Woodstock's community of brilliant dysfunctional musicians, opportunistic hippie capitalists and scheming dealers drawn to the area by Dylan and his sidekicks The Band. Central to the book's narrative is the broodingly powerful presence of Albert Grossman, manager of Dylan, The Band, Janis Joplin and Todd Rundgren - and Big Daddy of a personal fiefdom in Bearsville that encompassed studios, restaurants and his own record label. Intertwined in the story are the Woodstock experiences of artists as diverse as Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Paul Butterfield, Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton and Bobby Charles. Drawing on first-hand interviews with the remaining key players in the scene, and on the period when he lived there himself in the 1990s, Hoskyns has produced an East Coast companion to his bestselling L.A. Canyon classic Hotel California - a richly absorbing study of a vital music scene in a revolutionary time and place.

Barney Hoskyns is the co-founder and editorial director of online rock-journalism library Rock's Backpages (www.rocksbackpages.com), and author of several books including Across the Great Divide: The Band & America (1993), Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, & the Sound of Los Angeles (1996), Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons (2005), Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (2009) and Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin. A former US correspondent for MOJO, Hoskyns writes for Uncut and other UK publications, and has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone and GQ.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hoskyns, Barney

Leseproben

PROLOGUE: INTO THE MYSTIC

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, in 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 knows we are sat in the foothills of Overlook Mountain, a place sacred to Native Algonquin Indians centuries before it became a destination and settlement for artists and craftsmen 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 and 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 that Bob Dylan bought in the summer of 1965, and 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 succour 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 after-effects 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. A year after the group’s most soulful singer, Richard Manuel, hanged himself in 1986, 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 round 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 towards the big Bearsville house that 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 first 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 steel-house 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 visit 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 that open onto 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 autumn seeping through the car windows. As I always do, I felt like 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...