road trip chronicles: woodstock, ny

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?

lord huron, ‘long lost’

i have been drawn to this band’s unique sound ever since i first heard them in 2010. this is their fourth album, and it is at least as good as anything they have done so far. when describing their sound, one often runs across the phrase ‘spaghetti western’, and there is some value in that. many of the songs offer up aural landscapes featuring echo saturated melodies, soaring vocals, and dreamy orchestral flourishes. and all of this is packaged in catchy, well crafted songs. all i can say is you just have to listen to a few songs to get an idea of their sound. my guess is that you will either like them immediately, or you will decide that it’s just not your thing.

ben schneider founded the band in 2010, and he is the main songwriter. hailing originally from lansing, michigan, he now resides in los angeles and works primarily out of whispering pines studio. the studio, originally built in the 70’s by aretha franklin’s bandleader, provided some of the inspiration for the theme of this album.

schneider and his band imagined all the country and soul artists who might have played there, and created a cast of fictional characters and their stories. it is presented as a concept album, and the liner notes ask you to listen to it sequentially and all the way through in one sitting. there are small transitional segments narrated by an emcee, which gives it the feel of a seventies tv music show. schneider says he wanted it to ‘feel like a long lost classic you missed somehow – nostalgic and familiar in a way, but you can’t quite put your finger on it’. and i think that seems about right.

here are a few tracks to whet your appetite:

billy strings

as i mentioned in my last post, i went out to see billy strings the other night. my first large venue concert in about 18 months. having attended a number of social events since then, and mentioning this fact to a few people i regard as being reasonably well informed in music, i was somewhat surprised to find that hardly anyone had ever heard of him.

for the uninitiated, the next inevitable follow up question to me would be’ what kind of music is it?’. and my awkward response would be something like ‘well, it’s bluegrass, but then it isn’t’. at their very musical core, billy and his three cohorts are top notch bluegrass musicians. stripped down to their acoustic guitar, banjo, upright bass and mandolin, they can dial up classic bluegrass numbers that would make bill monroe proud. however, through the use of pickups and other gizmos, they can easily electronically ramp it up to jam band rock riffs. the whole show was spent going back and forth between these two extremes very comfortably and effectively. and it was fairly relentless, in a good way. other than a 15 minute set break, they really never stopped playing for a full three hours.

i was curious to see what the crowd would be like, as billy is 28 but many of the people i know that follow him are my age (not 28). i wasn’t really surprised to find the atmosphere in the parking lot to be akin to a dead show. in fact, the venue – legend valley (formerly known as buckeye lake), was where i last saw the grateful dead.

i brought the redeyegin twins with me, who are close to billy’s age. they had heard of him, but were not familiar with his music. well, they are now, and i think they are converted.

he is touring all summer, so if you are looking for something new to add to your concert schedule this year, i highly encourage you to check them out. it was easily one of the best shows i have seen in a long time.

thanks for driving, freddie.

some summer book suggestions

maybe you are going somewhere this summer where you can kick back and try to read a book or two. and maybe you were looking for something to expand your musical knowledge as well. i know that is on my agenda soon, so send me some suggestions if you have time. here are a few things i have read in the last few months that you might find of interest.

chris hillman – ‘time between’

this is an autobiography, chronicling his entire career, which is fairly substantial. if you are a fan of the byrds, the flying burrito brothers, gram parsons, and even his foray into country with the desert rose band, then i think you will find this engrossing. as with most musician biographies, he starts off with his childhood, and then gets into how he got started in the music business. as an aside, i should note that i usually skim through the early sections like this, as i usually find them to be only moderately useful in understanding their later careers. more on that later. but once he gets to the explosive path to stardom for the byrds, and how the original group crashed so early, you start to get hooked. throughout the entire book, chris is humble and fair to his musical partners. this is not a sex, drugs and rock n roll tell all, but rather a true and multi talented musician trying to let everyone know how it all went down on a musical level.

one things he mentions is that there are only a few people who knew gram parsons best, himself and emmylou harris being two of the three, and he delves into their relationship, both bad and good. i was not at all familiar with his career after the flying burrito brothers, specifically the desert rose band, but it was interesting to see how he kept things going, and then dealt with some health issues he suffered and eventually survived. because at the end of the day, he is a rock and roll survivor, and a voice of reason in what is often an unreasonable career.

my only quibble is his need to give an accounting of all the various bend members in all of the iterations of all the various bands he was in, and sometimes you just lose track of who they are. but overall it is a labor of love about the music he made, and the stories he felt were worth telling.

jeff tweedy – ‘how to write one song’

partially a follow up to his autobiography from a couple of years back, partially a companion piece to his solo album he put out in january, it is mainly a tutorial from a prolific songwriter to anybody interested in understanding his approach to the craft, and how to incorporate it into their own process. as a tweedy/wilco fan, i found it very interesting. it helps explain his unique lyrics and the sheer volume of his work. he pretty much writes every day. if you are thinking ‘well, i am not a songwriter, and have no intentions of being one’, i can say that there are life lessons in there if you choose to be open minded, which i hope i am. he has a very disciplined approach, every day. and i think that if you approach every day with whatever inspires you and set aside time like he does, you can have a better chance of achieving your goals.

richard thompson – ‘beeswing’

another autobiography, this one spanning his early life up until 1975. i assume there will be a follow up book for the rest of his career. but fans of thompson, of which i am certainly one, will know that this was maybe the most groundbreaking part of his career. his membership in fairport convention is very important, and he goes into great detail about how that band evolved and grew over time. analogies are often useless in the music world, but i do not think it is too far of a stretch to give a rough equivalency to their american counterparts – the band. both were at the forefront in organically fusing folk and rock traditions into a unique and honest way. the difference of course being that fairport folk inspirations were from the english and celtic lexicon.

there is also the explanation of why he eventually left fairport convention and went out on his own to a solo career, partially with his wife linda thompson. and then their eventual divorce.

like chris hillman above, he really steers away from the tell all aspect you often find in rock books, and instead is humble and honest with himself and his own shortcomings. it is a very well written book in my opinion. i am looking forward to the next one.

barney hoskyns – ‘small town talk’

this is probably one of the best chronicles of the musical history of a small town in new york called woodstock. i had read it before, and it has been out a while, but i thought i would tackle it again as i am going to woodstock in a couple of weeks to go see the above mentioned richard thompson play at levon helm’s barn for a two night run. kind of a bucket list thing. if you are interested in dylan’s post motorcycle crash period, the band’s early years, basement tapes, albert grossman, van morrison moondance period, and so much more, you may find this interesting. it is not about the famed concert, which as you may know was not actually held at woodstock. it is about a small town that had a rich musical and artistic community way before dylan got there, and a unique character that survives to this day.

holly george-warren – ‘janis, her life and music’

i am only partially through this one, and so i will give a full review soon, but so far it is as advertised – a full and fair rendering of her amazing and tragic career. at this point she is still in high school, but contrary to my opinion above, it is real clear that her early life very much informed the demons that would haunt her until her untimely death. as i was reading the other day i wondered if there were any good documentaries covering the same material, and so i watched this last night:

hope you enjoy. let’s go see some live music. heading out to see billy strings this friday.

john hiatt and the jerry douglas band, ‘leftover feelings’

as some of you may have noticed, i have been on an extended hiatus from posting anything on this blog for quite some time. this was not due to any one reason, but rather a confluence of events – day job demands, website host issues, redeyegin studio renovations, etc. – that pushed me in other directions for a while. another contributing factor was lack of inspiration. although i have been listening to new music the whole time, nothing had really jumped out to me that was worthy of writing that ‘new post’ after being off the grid for so long.

enter this new collaboration from john hiatt and the innovative jerry douglas band. hiatt is one of my favorite singer/songwriters of all time, and jerry is maybe the most widely recorded bluegrass artist there is, the greatest dobro player on the planet. recorded in nashville at the famed rca studio b, it has that element of a natural bond that is hard to replicate. it comes out this friday, but i have heard enough on the radio and from videos i have found to break the ice here and get back to sharing some new music with you.

enjoy.