The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang Read Free Book Online

town—and started exploring. By the next day, a Realtor had found us a beautiful red converted barn on a quiet lane called Chestnut Hill Road. The same sparkling stream that meandered by the motel ran alongside our new home. The serenity was awe inspiring.
    Along Tinker Street, Woodstock’s picturesque “downtown,” stood a hardware store, art galleries, cafés, and eclectic shops. Our favorite was the Juggler, an emporium of art supplies, books, guitar strings, and records. The owners, Jim and Jean Young, had moved to the East Coast from Berkeley. About fifteen years older than me, they were open-minded music fans who took us under their wings.
    At night, a goodly number of Woodstock’s three thousand residents ventured out for a bit of music making and partying at Café Espresso, Deanie’s, the Elephant, and the Sled Hill Café. The townsfolk were a combination of “descendants of Dutch settlers and successive waves of artists, craftspeople, dancers, musicians, urban dropouts, and rebels looking for a green alternative to Greenwich Village,” as described by Dylan biographer Robert Shelton. The village had long been populated by this blend of workaday, rural folk and free-spirited bohemians. Originally farmed by the Dutch in the mid-1700s, the eastern Catskills area had been nurturing artists for more than sixty years. In 1903, a trio of utopians—wealthy Englishman Ralph White-head, writer Hervey White, and artist Bolton Brown—settled in Woodstock to pursue philosopher John Ruskin’s stance against rampant industrialization. On 1,200 acres, in the shelter of Overlook Mountain, they created the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony to pursue the ideals of the arts-and-crafts movement. White moved to nearby Glenford and founded the Maverick Colony, where performing arts and music were the focus. In 1912, a branch of New York City’s Art Students League set up a summer program, and some painters and sculptors stayed on in town.
    By the 1920s, there were bacchanalian fêtes, with eccentric celebrants wearing handmade costumes for all-night revelry. A flyer for the first annual Maverick Festival, held in August 1915, promised: “wild sports going on” and the dancer Lada, who “illumines beautiful music like poems, and makes you feel its religion…you cry, it is so exquisite to see…All this in the wild stone-quarry theater, in the moonlight, with the orchestra wailing in rapture, and the jealous torches flaring in the wind! In the afternoon, there is also a concert, with a pageant, and strange doings on the stage…There will be a village that will stand for but a day, which mad artists have hung with glorious banners and blazoned in the entrance through the woods.”
    Though folk-music collectors and classical musicians including Aaron Copland had lived in the area since the forties, the music scene really picked up after Albert Grossman arrived in the early sixties. Several of the artists he managed, including Bob Dylan, fell in love with the place. By the time I arrived, Dylan had settled outside town with his family and was lying low. More visible locally, his backup musicians, who called themselves the Band, had just released their first album, Music from Big Pink . Its namesake was a house in nearby West Saugerties, where some of the Band lived in ’67—ground zero for the soon-to-be-legendary, bootlegged Basement Tapes , recorded there with Dylan. By the summer of ’68, the Band—Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson—who’d been on the road for years, had dispersed into the Woodstock community.
    GARTH HUDSON: We got to like this lifestyle, chopping wood and hitting our thumb with a hammer, fixing the tape recorder or the screen door, wandering into the woods…It was relaxed and low key. Which was something we had not enjoyed since we were children.
    At the Elephant Café, impromptu jams would break out with the likes of Paul Butterfield, a great blues vocalist and harmonica