During the 1950s Faier became proficient on the five-string banjo. He recorded a series of albums, including two for the Riverside label and another on Electra. In 1959 he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. By 1962 Billy was an accomplished and connected folk music veteran, so it makes sense that he co-founded the Woodstock Folk Festival, which occurred that year. After the festival Bernard and Mary Lou Paturel hired him as a talent booker for the Café Espresso.

The Café Espresso was the brainchild of Franklin “Bud” Drake and Jim Hamilton, two enterprising graduates of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. They transformed a former ice cream and sandwich eatery known as The Nook into a Parisian-style bistro. They set the ambience with a hand-painted bar, an indoor fountain and red-and-white-checked tablecloths. The carefree atmosphere encouraged artists and locals to mix in a warm and friendly manner. Drake and Hamilton were not restaurant professionals, so they relied on a Russian chef and a maître d’ with local connections to run the business. Faier made reference to the Drake/Hamilton management style on his album the beast of Billy Faier, in a cut titled, “The Unpleasantness at the Nook.”

Under the Paturels, who soon purchased the café, Faier began booking well-known local and national folk acts to play at the club. One such talent was Happy Traum. The latter came up to Woodstock on the bus from New York one cold spring weekend. Traum remembers that it was the weekend in 1963 that Bob Dylan played Town Hall. Other notable talents who played at the Espresso included Tom Paxton, Patrick Sky, Billy Batson, Jerry Moore, Major Wiley, along with many others.

One day in 1963 the Paturels lent their upstairs studio to Dylan to live and work. His presence attracted the likes of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, John Sebastian, the Farinas, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, and Peter, Paul and Mary to after-hour jam sessions at the café.

A Woodstock Playhouse program cover from August 1960, courtesy of Joe Hickerson

The Historical Society of Woodstock’s Folk Songs of the Catskills: The Spirit of Camp Woodland exhibit and related events drew hundreds of attendees this past summer. For example, on August 14 nearly 100 people attended the presentation/folk concert with Sue Rosenberg, Pat Lamanna, Joe Hickerson, Mickey Vandow and Eric Weissberg.

During the exhibit people asked about the linkage between Camp Woodland (near Phoenicia, NY) and Woodstock. As it happens, there are innumerable links. Herb Haufrecht, one of the authors of Folk Songs of the Catskills, and a Camp Woodland music counselor, lived in Shady, NY, a hamlet of Woodstock. Another connection was through Barbara Moncure, a local folk singer. She and Alf Evers (for many years the Woodstock Town Historian, and author of Woodstock: History of an American Town) used to venture over to Camp Woodland for the annual festivals. Barbara performed at them, and eventually recorded an album of Catskill Mountain songs for Folkways. In 1959, Alf organized the First Annual Catskill Mountain Folk Music Festival at the Colony Arts Center. Several Catskill Mountain folk singers like “Squire” Elwyn Davis and Harry Siemson, who had previously appeared at Camp Woodland, performed at that festival. Another instance of Camp Woodland/Woodstock linkage occurred in August 1960 when Joe Hickerson, a counselor at the camp, headlined a concert with Carolyn Hester at the Woodstock Playhouse.

Pete Seeger, a big influence at the camp, was connected to Woodstock via his wife, Toshi, who grew up in the town. Pete played at a Woodstock Playhouse concert in 1962. Funds from that concert partially financed the Woodstock Folk Festival at the Woodstock Estates in 1962. Bob Dylan arrived in town around 1963 and John Herald, a former camper, came up to Woodstock in 1965. John Cohen, a former camp counselor, played the Sound-Outs with his band the New Lost City Ramblers.

Many of these interconnections are spelled out in Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, published last year by WoodstockArts.

Bob Dylan (born May 24) and John Sebastian

In 1964 Doug Gilbert, a photojournalist on assignment for Look Magazine, came up to Woodstock, NY, to do a story on Bob Dylan. The folk singer was on the cusp of superstardom. The next two years saw Dylan release Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Gilbert took a slew of photos, but Look never ran the story. Years later he unearthed the photos in a shoebox.

 On the cover of the Roots book at left, Dylan is pictured exiting the Café Espresso driveway onto Woodstock’s Tinker Street. Riding shotgun on Dylan’s Triumph Motorcycle is John Sebastian.

Tim Hardin's Woodstock Piano; Remembering Tim on 12/23

Tim Hardin (1941-1980) moved to the Woodstock area in 1968 with his wife Susan Morss and his young son Damion. Already the town was a thriving music destination— with The Band, Bob Dylan, the Mothers of Invention, Richie Havens and the Blues Magoos in residence. It is said that Hardin, of all the songwriters in early 1960s Greenwich Village, was the best. His first album, recorded for Verve in 1966, yielded such tunes as “Reason to Believe,” which was covered by Rod Stewart, and “Hang On To a Dream” which became a staple for The Nice. In the aftermath of this release Bob Dylan referred to Hardin as the best songwriter alive.

It was with Tim Hardin 2, his second album, that the songwriter released “If I Were a Carpenter,” his most memorable song. Also on the album were such tunes as “Black Sheep Boy“ and “Lady Came from Baltimore.” During an eight-month period from 1965 to 1966 some of his best-known songs were written on a piano in his room in Los Angeles. By the time Hardin moved to Woodstock his career was taking off. Although his album sales weren’t great, his talent garnered respect in the music world. Particularly after his song “If I Were A Carpenter” was covered by such established acts as Bobby Darin, Johnny Cash and June Carter, The Four Tops and many others. Hardin headlined at many of the Sound-Outs and at WOODSTOCK. In his book, The Road to Woodstock, Michael Lang writes, “Tim was a friend, and I was a big fan of his music and was hoping he’d be at his best onstage.” This could have been a big break for Tim. Hardin had a strong first set and then he invited his band to join him onstage. Gilles Malkine was playing rhythm guitar for Tim and said in Lang’s book that the set went so badly that Malkine quit the music business for many years.

Post-festival, Hardin continued to record for Columbia and other labels and enjoyed some commercial success with numbers like “Simple Song of Freedom,” but his early promise was never realized. On December 29, 1980 he passed away at the age of 39 from a heroin overdose.

Cover image of the book, depicting Woody Guthrie at the Cooper Union, 1959

In 2001 powerHouse Books published there is no eye, John Cohen’s photographic memoir of his life and times. He is member of the New City Lost Ramblers and his photographs hang in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He has done field recordings, a number of fine albums, and films.

His book includes black and white images of Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Guthrie and many others. Cohen notes that “over the distance of time, those years on Third Avenue [1957-1964] seem very exciting, but in reality felt mostly desolate and run down. Still, I liked the sober seriousness of my daily life.” It was a time that Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Happenings were gathering steam. During this period Cohen rehearsed in the apartment with The New Lost City Ramblers and had his first photographic show. The mood of his book is filmic, lush and gritty.

Recently a friend recommended that we read the book, because it reminded him of Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock.” The title, there is no eye, is taken from Dylan’s Highway 61 liner notes, name checking Cohen.

Tracy Bigelow Grisman's Gaslight Trio: Ralph Rinzler, Bob Dylan and John Herald

In 1954, a 15-year old Johnny Herald saw Pete Seeger in concert at Camp Woodland, outside Phoenicia, NY. He was so inspired that he vowed he would be a musician, too. Herald, of Armenian-American background, was born and raised in Greenwich Village. His poet father used to take him around to parties where Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie performed live. On the liner notes to Roll on John, Herald recalls “and here I was, somebody that was in on another sort of bohemian revolution in the sense of the folk part of art; folk craft, folk culture and so on.”

Herald began listening to Don Larkin’s New Jersey radio program on bluegrass music (Larkin Barkin’). Soon he was jamming with Bob Dylan, Rory Block and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In 1959 he joined the Greenbriar Boys with John Yellin and Eric Weissberg. The latter was a fellow alum of Camp Woodland, although they actually met (according to Weissberg) at a freshman mixer at the University of Wisconsin.  Things started to heat up after Ralph Rinzler replaced Weissberg in the group. He urged the trio to practice more, and they won first prize for bluegrass in a North Carolina competition. Soon they landed a contract with Maynard Solomon’s Vanguard record label.

According to Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock,” John met his wife Kim in 1965 at the Café Espresso’s family table in Woodstock, NY. In those days everybody mixed—fans, musicians and artists alike. There was an easy camaraderie. Kim says that even then her future husband was conflicted about his life’s direction. His music career was on fire, but he loved nature and might easily have been a biologist for the state instead of a famous bluegrass musician. He wanted to be in nature and be true to himself. John, Kim says, didn’t understand that he couldn’t have success on his own terms. He had an inability to sacrifice everything for his art.

 Nonetheless he recorded four albums with the Greenbriar Boys: The Greenbriar Boys (1962), Ragged But Right! (1964), Dian and the Greenbriar Boys (1965) and Better Late Than Never (1966). In addition, he was kept busy with session work and in 1972 he recorded his first solo album for Paramount. A string of other albums followed. One of his best loved tunes is “Jon the Generator.” Unfortunately, over the years his conflicted feelings about his life’s path caused old friends like Dylan to pull away. He found it harder and harder to pay his bills and in 2005 he committed suicide.

Attendees of the upcoming presentation will learn why the festival was named Woodstock, and why it continues to be so closely associated with the town, even though the concert actually took place in Bethel, NY. The first part of the book features a transcript of a panel discussion that took place in August 2008 among townspeople—including Festival promoter Michael Lang—knowledgeable about the music scene in the late sixties. The second part of the book is a “roots of Woodstock” photo essay that chronicles the Arts and Crafts origins of the town, from its glass-making era in the 1800s to the founding of the Byrdcliffe colony in 1902. In addition, it details the town’s hallowed tradition of weekend-long music concerts, beginning in the early 1900s with Woodstock’s Maverick Festivals, and stretching up through the counter cultural Sound-Outs of the late 1960s.

 According to Billboard, “For those [readers] wishing to know more about the upstate New York culture that gave rise to the Woodstock festival, [this book] examines the area’s burgeoning music scene, including the open air Sound-Out[s] that inspired Michael Lang’s festival concept.” ForeWord says that it “delves deeper into the background of the festival than any other recent title; and Midwest Book Review calls it “a thoughtful, profusely illustrated preserve of American history, highly recommended for lay readers and serious students of the Woodstock event alike.”

 The book highlights the Woodstock exploits of artists, writers and performers such as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, and Richie Havens. Bob Fass, a Woodstock Sound-Out emcee and host of WBAI’s Radio Unnameable for more than forty years, contributed a brilliant and evocative foreword to the book. Also included are a compendium of important Woodstock players, a map of historic 1960s locations in the Woodstock area, and 115 images—many of them rare, vintage photos of the Woodstock music and art scenes.

Cover image is of Bob Dylan and John Sebastian exiting the Café Espresso in the early ‘60s

From the 8/13/09 issue of the Woodstock Times, “Woodstock Nation on the Shelves” by Paul Smart:

“Perhaps the biggest book bash the town’s seen in some time, the bringing to life, via an actual-to-heavens musical concert for the locally-produced Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to Woodstock by Weston and Julia Blelock, with a forward by Bob Fass, another legendary radio presence from the day.

Primarily comprised of a transcript from a symposium on the Sound Outs and bohemian flavor of the town prior to 1969 that took place last August, the book is worth owning for its Who’s Who of local characters and surprisingly evocative (and telling) superbly-captioned photos, filled out with info and anecdotes from a series of interviews the Blelocks conducted in recent years…and as strong a glimpse of what the town was 40 and 50 years ago as any descriptions found elsewhere. As well as the vast information covered in the transcript material itself, from those who lived through the days we’re all now remembering… or at least trying to.

This weekend’s Roots concert at the Bearsville Theater, on Saturday afternoon, evening and night, will include a number of old townies come back to celebrate the Sound Outs that preceded the big festival, including a host of long-awaited reunions.”

Bob Fass of RADIO UNNAMEABLE

For more than 40 years Bob Fass has hosted Radio Unnameable on Pacifica Radio’s WBAI. Fass’s show pioneered free-form radio. He has welcomed them all—the famous as well as the lesser known. Some of the former include Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, The Fugs, and Happy and Artie Traum.

In the late sixties Fass emceed a series of music festivals on the outskirts of Woodstock, NY. As Fass writes in his foreword to Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, these were known as the Sound-Outs: “Someone from USCO called it Sound-Out because it wasn’t a Be-In.” He continues,

“We invited the best musicians we knew. Stagehands built a stage. Macrobiotic, energy-transforming food was prepared and sold for pennies a bowl. Mind-expanding goulash imported from around the world was abundant. It was a potent mix of the new and the traditional. There was a whole lot of love and whole lot of creativity and community spirit . . .”

 The festivals were open-air affairs held on Pan Copeland’s farm in West Saugerties, NY. Some of the acts associated with the Sound-Outs include Ellen McIlwaine’s Fear Itself, the Colwell-Winfield Blues Band, Tim Hardin, Don McLean, Scott Fagan, Frank Wakefield, and Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys.

Bob Dylan's BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home was written upstairs from Woodstock’s Café Espresso in a studio that Dylan dubbed “The White Room.” This building, at 59 Tinker Street, is now occupied by The Center for Photography. Dylan wrote the album at a feverish pace and appropriated bits of lore from the local scene to fill out his lyrics. For example, in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Dylan raps in the final lines, “The pump don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles.” This is said by locals to refer to the water pump at the Woodstock Library.

One of Dylan’s sideman on the project was Kenny Rankin, who performed at a Woodstock Sound-Out in 1967. ROOTS is in mourning for Kenny, who passed away on June 7, 2009. For more on this, click here.