As the psychedelic era reached its frenzied pitch in late
1967, as even the earthen-blues Stones were dressing up like wizards and
peddling lysergic premonitions, Bob Dylan was looking back and bucking trends by
issuing the stripped John Wesley Harding
from his tree-lined retreat in Woodstock, New York. That record, as well as
another by Dylan’s neighbors and collaborators The Band, completely shifted
Rock & Roll from the cosmos to the farm in 1968, and pretty soon hippies
across the nation were rambling about “getting it together in the country.”
It’s ironic that Dylan was such a leader in this movement
since he both hated being thought of as a leader and he hated hippies. In fact,
he’d essentially abandoned the leftist politics that won his original following
to become pretty conservative— perhaps not incidentally, the prevailing
political stance of pre-hippie-influx Woodstock—following the lead of manager
Albert Grossman into an odd-bedfellow balance of rustic living and materialism,
and even privately voicing support for segregationist George Wallace. Nevertheless,
the hippies flooded Woodstock, tried their best to get to Dylan, and staged the
most famous outdoor festival in rock history.
In his new book Small
Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock, Barney Hoskyns fortunately devotes a mere chapter to those three
days of peace, love, and music, because the Woodstock Festival has been
examined and examined and examined in plenty of other places. Yet, it is also
the climactic event in a story that begins with Grossman’s move to that New
York community in 1963, builds through Dylan’s retreat and The Band’s emergence
as artists in their own rights, and downslides with sad tales of
over-commercialization and over-hype. We lose The Band’s Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm before the tale is over. Long before then, Helm and
Robbie Robertson split bitterly. Ditto Dylan and Grossman. Doomed souls such as
Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin end up in Woodstock on their way out of this
mortal coil. For too many, “getting it together in the country” meant hard
drugs and early death. Others, such as Dylan and Van Morrison, managed to
extricate themselves from a place they initially deemed enchanting but
ultimately regarded as a toxic zone.
Hoskyns keeps his authorial distance for the most part, though
he cannot hide his own enchantment with the storied burg, rendering its
striking sights, sounds, and smells in three vivid dimensions, and the way he
occasionally jumps into the present to detail its thriving music and art scene rescues
his story from the tragedy bin. There may have been some serious downsides to
the old, old Woodstock scene, but this story is fleet-footed, full of
creativity, and peopled with a dazzling array of artists, from those previously
mentioned to George Harrison, Patti Smith, The Isley Brothers, and the Rolling Stones. And the
focus on Todd Rundgren’s wacky glam/prog exploits throughout the seventies that
ends the book rescues the story from being a prolonged hippie-fest. Plus, a
story that results in the creation of The
Basement Tapes, Music from Big Pink,
Pearl, Moondance, Something/Anything?
and possibly even All Things Must Pass
can’t really be called an unhappy one.