Barney Hoskyns is without a doubt one of Britain’s best loved music writers. Over the  past twenty-five years he has penned groundbreaking books on artists like Tom Waits and The Band, as well as his seminal work on the California singer-songwriter scene of the late 1960s Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons. His latest outing, Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in Woodstock, could be considered the east coast counterpoint. It is an in depth look at the bohemian town of Woodstock in Upstate New York, based on extensive first hand interviews as well as Barney’s own experiences of living there in the 1990s.

Barney is an old friend of the Idler and agreed to sign a few copies for us to sell through the website and at Pedlars General Store on Talbot Road. He also generously sent us an extract from the book which you can read below. Grab yourself a beautiful, signed 1st edition hardback copy whilst stocks last, click HERE to purchase.

Book Extract from:

Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in Woodstock by Barney Hoskyns 

Paint My Mailbox Blue

THANKS TO Bob Dylan and The Band, musicians were showing up in Woodstock in ever-greater numbers. In the groovy parlance of the times, they wanted to “get it together in the country”. On the West Coast, Canned Heat were ‘Going Up the Country’ and Taj Mahal was ‘Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue’.

The hippie exodus from cities was in full swing.

“We’d heard that Woodstock was a place where you could work on your material and find your voice,” says singer-guitarist Jon Gershen.

“It was very cheap and there weren’t a lot of distractions.” With his band the Montgomeries – which included his brother David and bass player Tony Brown – Gershen found a bright yellow house off Route 212 in Shady. Turning a front-parlour room into a rehearsal space, the band set about writing the songs they hoped would get them a record deal. Before long they’d bonded with other aspiring musicians who’d come to town.

“There was this sense of Woodstock being a cloistered village with the mountains around you,” Gershen says. “And because you felt kind of boxed in, you got to know other musicians. Someone would say, ‘I’m a singer’. And you’d say, ‘Well, come on over.'”

Nearly all the musicians frequented a coin-operated Laundromat in what was known as the Bearsville Flats. “It was run by ‘Sam the Laundromat Man’,” says Gershen. “He’d had a tracheotomy and had a hole in his throat that he smoked through. You’d run into Garth Hudson there. You’d run into everyone there except Dylan.”

Gershen noticed that most of the musicians came from urban backgrounds, which initially exacerbated the animosity of the locals. Yet as the newcomers settled into the small-town, backwoods lifestyle, slowly they were accepted. “You pretty quickly started to have a love affair with the place,” Gershen says. “We would go and get our state fishing licenses so that we could go down to the Ashokan Reservoir and fish. When people ponder how all of a sudden Dylan went from the wild maniac to the serene family man, you have to know that when you moved up to Woodstock, the place was a powerful force.”

“It was a sort of back-to-the-farm thing that seemed attractive to people who wanted to get out of the rat-infested rehearsal rooms,” says artist manager Mark McKenna, who came to Woodstock in 1968 to meet the band Fear Itself. “Chris Zaloom [Fear Itself’s guitarist] was living in a cold-water flat on the Bowery – it was like Dresden! So it was a no-brainer for these guys to say, ‘Let’s get out of here and go where there’s grass and trees and no rats or roaches!'”

Another musician who wound up in town was a drummer with the splendidly hippiefied name Daoud Elias Shaar. “Every weekend, half the people in the East Village would get on buses and go to Woodstock,” says the man now known more economically as plain Daoud Shaw. “And they would sleep anywhere: in the woods, crashing at somebody’s house.”

Shaw had joined a New York art-rock band called Chrysalis, who made an under-promoted album for MGM Records and then had the same bright idea that everyone was having. “It was, ‘Let’s get out of New York City’,” he says. “It was, ‘We’ll get a house together and we’ll rehearse in the living room.’ And that’s exactly what we did.”

Featuring singer Nancy Nairn and guitarist/writer J. Spider Barbour, Chrysalis were one of the first amplified groups to play regularly at Woodstock’s Café Espresso. “It had a crummy p.a. system, but there was a drinking crowd that seemed to like good music,” says Shaw. “And there were always people sitting in – sometimes people who shouldn’t have been sitting in.”

Tim Hardin was another regular at the Espresso, often wreaking minor havoc there. One night he was at the piano when David Boyle asked why he couldn’t play “something nice like ‘Misty Roses'”. Fuming, Hardin reached to grab hold of a chainsaw that Boyle had with him. Boyle stood his ground. “You can ask my girlfriend if she wants to dance,” he said, “but you can’t touch my chainsaw.” Another local legend has a smacked-out Hardin nodding out in his car in the depths of a Woodstock winter and being entombed by a heavy snowfall.

To Jeremy Wilber, who tended bar at the nearby Sled Hill Café, Hardin was “one of those people born with an overwhelming burden of unrelievable pain”. When Wilber visited the singer’s house with Sonia Malkine’s guitarist son Gilles, it was “a very subdued scene”.

The house in question provided the location for one of the stranger recordings of the late 1960s. The mouthful of a title alone (Suite for Susan Moore and Damion – We Are – One, One, All in One) had the Columbia executives scratching their heads. But it was the experiment of the recording itself that made one wonder who could possibly have green-lit such a project. The place was literally wired for sound by engineer Don Puluse, with cables running through to a console and board in the nursery. Hardin had stipulated that tape should run 24/7 to capture every stray moment of inspiration.

“This was the mothership of originality,” says the album’s producer Gary Klein. “Don couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘Gary, this is going to be some ride’. It was a project that was the first of its kind and maybe the last of its kind.”

Holding the chaos together was Susan Moore herself – or more accurately, Morss – the mother of Tim’s son Damion. She made tea and baked cakes for Klein, Puluse and a smattering of musicians from Paul Butterfield’s new band: guitarist Buzzy Feiten, trumpeter Keith Johnson, alto saxophonist David Sanborn and drummer Philip Wilson. Butterfield himself played harmonica on ‘Last Sweet Moments’.

“They were in a good place,” Klein says of Hardin and Morss. “Tim was kissing Susan and grabbing her in front of everyone. He loved showing his affection. He loved playing with his kid when he wasn’t recording.” But things can’t have been quite as happy as they seemed. A mere two weeks after tying the knot with Hardin in a small private ceremony, Morss – to whom the whole meandering opus had been an extended poetic hymn – took baby Damion and split.

“It’s a very impressionistic recording,” Gary Klein says of Suite for Susan Moore… “It’s just out there, and they paid a lot of money for it. I’m surprised they even released it, to tell you the truth.” Even Hardin fan Will Sheff of Okkervill River struggled with the album, writing in 2005 that “its sadness comes not from contemplation or from clear-eyed and hard-won wisdom but from how empty Hardin’s pronouncements on romantic commitment and fatherly love ring”.

Another local musician who played on the album was keyboard player Warren Bernhardt, who’d gigged with Hardin in New York and followed him up to Woodstock in late 1968. “Tim called me the ‘Minister of Joy’,” he remembers. “When he was on, he was the best singer I ever heard in my life. But the Suite recording was pretty haphazard. There was a lot of sitting around and waiting. Tim had a couple of go-fers: Michael Lang was one of them. It was, ‘Mike, go get us some cheeseburgers and coffee…'”

Bernhardt was playing the Espresso on the night Hardin wandered off to find a fingerpick and didn’t return for three hours. “But everybody stayed,” he says. “And when he got back we did a long, long set till about five in the morning. It was like going to see Charlie Parker: you just had to wait till he showed up.”

Hardin was also a regular at the Sled Hill, a funky dive at the intersection of Deming Street and Sled Hill Road opened by Buddy Sife in 1964. A notorious local known as “Crazy” Wayne Ambrosio was in his cups one night at the Sled Hill when Hardin sauntered past to retrieve his guitar from the storeroom. “There goes Tim Hard-On,” Ambrosio muttered, to which Hardin responded by returning with the guitar and lifting it high over the drunk man’s head.

“I happened to be standing behind Tim at that moment,” says Jeremy Wilber. “I grabbed the body of the guitar so that he couldn’t kill Wayne. I’m pretty sure I kept him out of jail.”

By early 1969, the Sled Hill was the main hangout for Woodstock’s musical in-crowd, a former lumber shed where the more bibulous stars would show up in the small hours. “If you played a serious gig, that was at the Espresso,” says Graham Blackburn, “but the Sled Hill was the main meeting place.” Even Dylan came by. “He wouldn’t come to play,” says Jeremy Wilber, “but when the guitars were passed around after-hours he’d say, ‘Hey, I know a tune’. And Bobby Neuwirth would pick up a guitar and sing back, and then Levon Helm would sing something else. That was not unusual.”

Less of a hangout per se was the Elephant. Seizing on Woodstock’s status as a bucolic outpost of Greenwich Village, Gaslight Café manager Sam Hood converted the former home of the S.S. Sea Horse bar into a properly functioning club where folk singers and bluesmen played over summer weekends.

“A lot of live venues in Woodstock were kind of ad hoc affairs,” says Jon Gershen. “Sam was the first guy who’d actually owned and managed a big-city club. He put a lot of money into the Elephant, and that made people take notice. He was able to bring in a lot of well-known performers. I remember a riveting show by Doc and Merle Watson. Everyone turned up for that one, including all five guys from The Band.”

By the early summer of 1969, the Elephant and the Espresso were packed almost every weekend. Just a year earlier, Larry Packer of Cat Mother & the All Night News Boys had strolled down Rock City Road with a fellow musician.

“The guy said to me, ‘You watch, one day this town will be like Provincetown,'” Packer says. “I said, ‘Come on, you’re crazy.’ But he was right.”

Barney Hoskyns’ Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix & Friends  is published by Faber, to order a signed 1st edition hardback copy click HERE