Music scene hot on both sides of Hudson

By Rand Otten
Poughkeepsie Journal

Woodstock, a town that had lured artists and free thinkers since the Civil War, and other communities in the Hudson Valley — long-time havens from bustling city centers — were the summer retreats for members of the Greenwich Village folk protest scene that would eventually shape music history.

While painters captured the scenic beauty of Henry Hudson’s most famous discovery, musicians came to this region looking for quiet downtime but found themselves inspired by the hills and valleys to create pieces that would capture time and place.

Thank the first British invasion, that of Ralph Whitehead in 1902, for transforming the small village of Woodstock into a legendary center of music, arts and culture.

Whitehead, the son of wealthy British industrialists, obtained an appreciation for the arts from his mentor, John Ruskin, a British philosopher known for his staunch defense of artistic freedom and inventiveness.

‘‘Whitehead saw the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution on the environment, the soot and the pollution, and set out to start an arts and crafts center in the woods of America,’’ said Alf Evers, 94, historian for the Town and Village of Woodstock and a lifelong Ulster resident.

Byrdcliffe lured artists

‘‘Woodstock had been a summer resort since the end of the Civil War, with its trout streams and marked rural charm, Whitehead and his partners (Hervey White and Bolten Browne) bought farms on the side of Woodstock’s Overlook Mountain for what would eventually become the Byrdcliffe artists center.’’

The center, established in 1902, was a haven for the talents of local and regional artists, where crafts were produced by hand, a place to take and teach art lessons, learn color printing and play all forms of music.

At weekly dances, music students would play recitals for the entire town, hosted at Whitehead’s private White Pines House.

While Byrdcliffe musicians performed the fine styles of classical Mozart and Beethoven and the contemporary music of the early 1900s, including Edward Elgar and Claude Debussy, a separate folk scene was also emerging, a blend of the styles of local communities and the folk songs native to Europe.

‘‘It was a town and a region that was always fond of music, with square dances and recitals going on all the time,’’ remembered Evers.

Folk music took hold

It was those sing-a-longs and eclectic garden parties that eventually attracted Manhattan’s beat poets to the country and helped launch a folk movement that continues today throughout the region.

‘‘Pete Seeger brought the guitar to Woodstock,’’ remembered Evers, who started living in Woodstock when Seeger, a Beacon resident, Grammy Award-winning folk singer and environmentalist, arrived in the mid 1940s. ‘‘It was a place where people got together and put their political and social beliefs to music. Seeger would then take those ideas from Woodstock to the world.’’

It was those early Bohemian qualities of the region and its undeniable beauty that would make it one of the world’s most known and most hidden centers for music’s elite.

Using the property and cottage his mother purchased years before, Peter Yarrow, one third of the Peter, Paul and Mary singing group, started making trips to Ulster County from Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s.

These trips, though insignificant at the time, would change the entire face of the Hudson Valley musically, sparking a cultural fire that burns today.

‘‘A lot of it was geography,’’ said Ike Phillips, vice president of sales and marketing for WDST-FM radio in Woodstock and a longtime Ulster County resident. ‘‘It was a place where people had summer houses and they would invite friends up from New York on the weekends.’’

The snowball effect

Thus the start of the snowball effect: Yarrow was friends with a young folk upstart named Bob Dylan; Dylan was managed by a New York club owner named Albert Grossman; Grossman also managed a Texas blues singer named Janis Joplin. And so on and so on until everyone from folk legend Joan Baez and electric guitar master Jimi Hendrix to folk singer and activist Odetta and the members of The Band were living, working and visiting the area.

Grossman, who died in 1986 but established the renowned Bearsville Sound Studios and Bearsville Theater before his death, had a profound impact on driving artistic traffic to the Hudson Valley and Woodstock.

And that long line of stars is what initially brought Michael Lang to Woodstock.

Lang, who originally wanted to build a studio in the same area as Grossman, eventually used his contacts in the entertainment industry and his new Woodstock friends to plan for a music festival in Woodstock.

That singular event, the 1969 Woodstock Music & Arts Festival, which was held in rural Bethel and was too big to be held in the town for which it was named, was the reason that a population of free thinkers and freedom seekers became known as the ‘‘Woodstock Generation.’’

While history was being made at Cafe Espresso (most recently the Tinker Street Cafe) along Tinker Street in Woodstock and at the Big Pink in Saugerties, home and recording studio to The Band, the east side of the river was making its own name in the music industry.

Larry Plover found the Hudson Valley while a student at Poughkeepsie’s Marist College. And like many people taken with the area and its artistic elements, Plover never left.

Plover and his music and eventual business partner, Mike Chiriatti, started playing their brand of blues and jazz around town, from the coffeehouses near Vassar College to The Derby downtown.

Their first bar, Frivolous Sal’s, was just the start of a music environment in Poughkeepsie that exists today. From the experience making music and making drinks at Sal’s, the pair met up with Lloyd Canning to turn an old movie theater into a music club.

Thus The Chance was born.

Located just off Main Street in Poughkeepsie, the trio opened the club in May 1970.

‘‘It was just magical,’’ said Plover, who ran the club from 1970-1979. ‘‘We didn’t feel any music was better than the other. We just loved to hear everything on that stage.’’

While music greats like Muddy Waters and Lionel Hampton played the stage, the audience was filled with everyone from Jerry Garcia and Bob Dylan to Watergate offender turned talk show host G. Gordon Liddy and 1960s drug guru Timothy Leary.

‘‘There was this elite, but not elitist, core of musicians living all over the area that tapped into the club,’’ Plover said.

Plover chalks up most of the area’s success musically and historically to one thing — fate.

‘‘When you have a Pete Seeger and a Bob Dylan and the coincidence of Woodstock and its festivals, all the pieces where out there and it just came together perfectly,’’ he said. ‘‘It was a great place at the right time and that legacy continues today.’’

Venues like The Chance (The Police played there as unknowns), Woodstock’s Joyous Lake (Phish got some of its grass-roots following there) and Pawling’s Towne Crier Cafe (Ani DiFranco played there ) launched many a career over the past three decades.

Those venues continue to bring some of the most eclectic and interesting music to the area. On any given night, you can find local and national band playing the blues, banging out some funk, beating out reggae or singing folk ballads.

And with numerous sound and recording studios dotting the area, most notably Bearsville Studios, A-Pawling and Millbrook Sound Studios, the region continues to draw some of the world’s most famous and influential artists to record and live here.

It’s still home to most members of The Band, jazz star Pat Metheny, pop artists like Natalie Merchant, members of the B-52s and many more.

‘‘It was the winds of fate that brought us to this area,’’ said Levon Helm, drummer for The Band. ‘‘What got me is the people and the woods. It’s a whole world away from New York City, filled with people who remind me of folks I grew up with and artists I’ve come to know and respect.

‘‘It’s just one of those good places on this earth.’’