Tainted love | 23 March 2016

In 1963, when the bloom was still on the rose, Bob Dylan described Woodstock as a place where ‘we stop the clouds, turn time back and inside out, make the sun turn on and off… the greatest place’. Six years later, he wrote in Chronicles: Volume One, ‘Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place of chaos.’

Barney Hoskyns, who lived there in the 1990s, marshals plenty of evidence to support both assessments. This Catskills hamlet has been at various times a blue-collar small town, a bohemian enclave, a tourist trap, a hotbed of creativity, a cauldron of hedonism, a madhouse and ‘a counter-cultural touchstone’. In its heyday it attracted such luminaries as Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, Todd Rundgren, George Harrison and The Band. Such was its reputation that the promoters of the 1969 festival appropriated its name even though their Aquarian pageant took place 60 miles away.

But this engaging book’s anti-hero isn’t a musician. It’s Albert Grossman, manager of Dylan and Joplin, ‘hippie baron of Woodstock’, and one of the record business’s great visionary bullies. ‘Integrity bothered Albert,’ wrote the folksinger Dave Van Ronk. ‘He used to say there was no such thing as an honest man.’ Grossman was both the serpent in Eden and the man who, for better or worse, made Woodstock what it was.

There was already something alluring about the place. In the early 20th century, it was home to Ralph Whitehead’s Ruskin-inspired Byrdcliffe arts colony and its more radical offshoot, Maverick, whose inaugural 1915 festival was touted as ‘a village that will stand for but a day’. The place the local newspaper called ‘the most cosmopolitan village in the world’ was primarily popular with painters and craftsmen until Grossman moved there in 1963 and turned it into a rural outpost of the music industry.