if you are a huge music fan like i am, there are certain areas of our country that are associated with the creation of your passion. be it new orleans, new york city, nashville, austin, laurel canyon, etc., there is not a list does that not usually include woodstock. it has always been on my list of places i needed to go see, and i finally made my trip this weekend.

the occasion was a richard thompson two night stand at levon helm’s barn in woodstock. when thinking of a woodstock trip, it was always going to include a show at his barn/studio. artists and music lovers make the pilgrimage to this venue to both honor the legend of levon helm and to support the community that thrives around it. and i can tell you, if you can find a musician you like on their calendar, you should consider making the trip. it is a really cool place and the intimacy and quality of the stage is something you will never forget. i don’t know the actual capacity, but it can’t be more than a couple hundred folks.

richard thompson was great both nights. all of my traveling partners were huge fans of him, and we all commented that none of us had ever seen a bad show by him. it was a perfect venue for his acoustic sets and his typical between song banter. his opening act of tift merritt was solid both nights. i have been a big fan of hers since i bought her ‘tambourine’ album in 2004. she has faded from the scene for a while now, and this was her first public performance in a number of years, but she nailed it.

we stayed in an old farmhouse just outside of town that the owner said was built in 1749. it was a great staging ground for our forays over to the the barn (about a mile away) and downtown woodstock, maybe a few miles at most.

saturday was spent exploring the area. it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this site that i am a big fan of dylan and the band, two of the most famous residents of this small town. so one of my must do items on my list was to find ‘big pink’, the rental house that some the members of the band lived in, and where all of the ‘basement tapes’ was recorded. we discovered that it was about a 15 minute drive from our place. after about ten minutes it became abundantly clear that it was on a private one lane road that backed up into the hills. there were plenty of no trespassing signs, but we were so close and when we found it we jumped out of the car and took a few pictures and then got our asses out of there.

then we went down to bearsville, which is a small village just west of woodstock, where dylan and robbie robertson lived near their manager, al grossman. grossman invested much of his money he made in the business into the surrounding area, including the bearsville studio and the bearsville theater.

the former is now closed, but we stopped at the latter for some live music and some bbq. the theater is also a music studio now, and the band recorded their third album – ‘stage fright’ – there. they recently released an expanded version of that album upon it’s 50th anniversary, and it has a great second disc with a live show from royal albert music hall in 1971. i highly recommend it.

as far as the actual town of woodstock goes, it is likely to be what you would expect. is there a large contingent of hippies now eligible for medicare? yes. are there a lot of restaurants with creative and healthy menu items? yes. is it hard to find a tie dye t-shirt? no.

it is a charming little city set in the foots of the catskill mountains and has a rich musical and artistic history that very much predates the 60’s. before it became famous for the musical scene in the mid sixties, it was a fairly conservative populace that kept things simple there. for a long time there was a dissonance between the local townfolk and the musicians who would bubble up from new york on the weekends. one of the more concrete examples of that was the planning for the famous woodstock concert of 1969. originally planned to be on the outskirts of town, the local leaders put their foot down and resisted the organizers. so much so that it was relocated to a farm about a 90 minute drive away in bethel, ny.

it was a wholly (holy?) satisfying trip, and i am so glad we went. would i go again? if just to see woodstock, i would say no. but i could justify it to get to levon’s place again, if someone comes up on the bill that would be perfect for the venue.

thanks to my traveling buddies – kevin, john, and chuck. we have some stories, don’t we?