Until two years
ago the August Bank Holiday in my village of Gomshall was celebrated with a
day-long rock festival that took place on the Sunday in the beer garden alongside the
Compasses Inn. Featuring local musicians, it was christened Gomstock, a legacy
of the great 1969 festival in upstate New York transplanted across the Atlantic
more than four decades later to this remote outpost in the Surrey Hills. It is
also the name of a small town in NY state whose fate is to be forever
associated with the festival even though it actually took place elsewhere, 43
miles to the southwest to be precise.
This
strange anomaly needs to be swiftly addressed and then discarded as far as Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns new book
about Woodstock, is concerned. “Woodstock ruined Woodstock,” he writes at the
beginning of chapter 10, at pains to explain how the town’s association with
the festival was no good thing. Hordes of tourists would thereafter arrive,
turning a rural idyll into a hippie landmark that continues to draw the curious
who to this day still inquire, ‘Where was it held?’
Of
far greater significance is that earlier in the sixties the town of Woodstock became
a refuge for a number of important musicians, among them Bob Dylan, The Band,
Van Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, and it is their relationship with the town that interests
Hoskyns, not the festival. Equally importantly, it became the home of Dylan’s
manager Albert Grossman whose presence looms over Small Town Talk like a ‘rustic potentate’, as Hoskyns describes him.
Grossman bought up many properties in the town, opened restaurants and
established the Bearsville recording studio and label there, but he was feared
and respected in equal measure, a curious mixture of avarice, carelessness and compassion.
It’s no wonder that in his chatty introduction Hoskyns, who lived in Woodstock
himself for four years in the late nineties, alludes to the threat of a lawsuit
from Grossman’s widow Sally.
All
of which adds plenty of spice to what is clearly a labour of love for this
seasoned writer. He seems to know a vast number of musicians, famous and
otherwise, who’ve made Woodstock their base over the years and their testimony
informs his entertaining and enlightening account of a town that Morrison might have had in
mind when he wrote ‘Into The Mystic’. There’s certainly something mystical
about the place, located as it is between the Hudson River and Catskill
Mountains, its population hovering around the 6,000 mark. In the days before
the rock stars descended, Woodstock had a reputation as an artists’ colony
though the relationship between the locals, that is those who’d lived there for
generations and had ‘normal’ jobs, and the artists was always frayed at the
edges. This wasn’t improved by the arrival of the musicians, Dylan leading the
way in 1965 with the stated intention of becoming a family man, there to raise
his growing family with Sara Lownds, the mother of his brood. Naturally he
comes under siege from fans and when later in the decade he falls out with
Grossman over fiscal issues related to song publishing – the manager made as
much money from covers like Peter, Paul & Mary’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and
The Byrds’ ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ as the writer – it starts to become unpleasant. It
was here too, in 1966, that Dylan had his motor cycle accident – he really
ought to have worn a crash helmet – and Hoskyns’ treatment of this still
mysterious episode and its aftermath is as thorough as I’ve read anywhere.
Next
The Band arrive, there to write the songs that would appear on Music From Big Pink and, most famously,
to contribute to Dylan’s Basement Tapes.
Not surprisingly in view of Hoskyns’ first-rate 1993 Band biography Across The Great Divide,
this is the book’s strongest and most endearing section; how the rustic allure
of Woodstock shaped a style of music that is part folk, part gospel, part soul,
part rock’n’roll and, above all, fundamentally rural, in direct contrast to
the harsher, flashier, less rootsy sounds of the city. That The Band’s most loved
songs sound like they could have been written at any time in the last 100 years
owes a lot to the view from their pink house, the landscape, the sky and the
mountains, the lakes and the forests. That sound and feel went on to seduce Eric
Clapton, George Harrison – a frequent visitor – and bands like Traffic who
famously adopted the same course of action in the UK, ‘getting it together in
the country’.
Meanwhile,
the influx of rock stars attracts large numbers of beautiful women to Woodstock
and they are generous with their favours, especially towards musicians, and
drugs become an issue. Drink, too, is a problem, not least because everyone
seems to get behind the wheel when they’ve had a skinful. All this promiscuity,
adultery, drunkenness, drugging and no-holds-barred hedonism certainly makes
for an entertaining read but there’s a slightly sinister undercurrent to
Hoskyns’ tale that isn’t helped by the arrival in town of shady characters like
Mike Jeffery, whose management of Hendrix is far from benevolent, and the
doomed Paul Butterfield who charges around like the proverbial bull in a china
shop.
Hoskyns
seems to be one of the few journalists to have had a close encounter with Van
Morrison and come away unscathed. The Belfast Cowboy is desperate to engage
with Dylan yet at the same time chronically withdrawn, so that when the two do
eventually meet Morrison, hilariously, doesn’t recognise the man with whom he’s
just exchanged a few casual words. In a subsequent phone call between the two
men Dylan talks of plans for touring the US by train with a big troupe of
musicians – shades of Rolling Thunder – but nothing comes of it, of course. This
shyness goes some way to explaining Morrison’s notorious tetchiness, and it
seems only natural that the musician with whom he would bond most closely is
Richard Manuel, the most soulful member of The Band, who is similarly reserved
and fatally disposed towards the bottle.
All
of these encounters are reported fly-on-the-wall style, taking us into inner
sanctums where legendary music was made. Eye-opening stories abound and in this
respect the book is a delight. That said, when the big guns move out of town the story
flags a bit, with Hoskyns worthily obliged to continue until the present day,
even as it peters out, though his closing chapter, aptly named ‘Broken Heart’,
drips with fond nostalgia for times past. Before then, however, we get a lot of
information about lesser known musos who’ve settled in the town and also the
entire history of Bearsville Records, enlivened only by Todd Rungren’s role in
the enterprise, which big chief Grossman neglects in favour of his culinary interests.
Rundgren, of course, was the antithesis of the Woodstock ambience, not only in
his music and presentation but in his strong work ethic and unpubbable nature,
all of which adds a bit of frisson to these later chapters, as does the testimony
of his main squeeze, the fragrant Bebe Buell. While the Bearsville story drags
on a bit, it is to Hoskyns credit that his enthusiasm for the music keeps the
tale alive, as do stories like that of Bobby Charles, the songwriter who penned
‘See You Later Alligator’ and washed up in Woodstock on the lam with drugs
charges hanging over his head. Grossman gets him off as part of a record deal and though the
relationship ends in tears – as do almost all of Grossman’s business relationships
– it does produce the lovely ‘Small Town Talk’, the song about Woodstock gossip that Charles wrote with Rick Danko
and which Hoskyns judiciously selects as the title for his book.
Places,
too, are as crucial to the Woodstock ambience as the musicians who populate
them. Most, like the Joyous Lake, erupt like firework displays, brilliant but
short lived, of their time like so many other rock’n’roll clubs elsewhere. Many,
of course, only come alive after the regular punters are tucked up in bed. At
various times the Joyous Lake presented local residents Charles Mingus, Tim
Hardin, stray members of The Band and Richie Havens, while the waitresses wore
“tiny little short-shorts and bandanas tied around their breasts”, according to
local writer Martha Frankel. “When you went through the door [of the Green
Room],” observed another local, “you never knew what you were going to see.
Nine times of out ten it was somebody getting a blowjob.” Such behaviour might
raise an eyebrow nowadays but this was the seventies when, as Frankel points
out: “Nobody cared.” I know what she means.
It
is inevitable that a book like this would end on a sad note, not just how the
demise of the town’s musical customs seems to reflect the same thing that’s
happening in places everywhere when cash trumps culture, but with the deaths of
so many central characters. Grossman aside, top of the list of those who died
too young are The Band’s three great rebel-rousers Richard Manuel, Rick Danko
and Levon Helm, the latter deserving special mention for doggedly continuing
Woodstock’s tradition for rustic music long after the ship had sailed. Arkansas-born
farm boy Helm, as Hoskyns makes clear, was the bridge between the locals and
the musicians, whose parties were attended by as many plumbers and carpenters
as singers and guitar pickers. In the last decade of a life brought to a close
by cancer in 2012 Helm became the magnet for a host of top musicians who
performed, often alongside him, at shows in his barn studio that he called
Midnight Rambles. This was about as far removed from big rock, from Live Nation
and the like, as our annual Gomstock was from the Woodstock Festival: music for pleasure not for profit. In a moving
coda devoted to the last few years of Levon Helm’s life, Hoskyns writes: “If
there was something a mite contrived about the way he had been positioned as a
patron saint of Americana – O
Levon Where Art Though, anyone? – Helm himself was as genuine
an article as American music could boast.” Based on this testimony I couldn’t
agree more.
Highly recommended.
