Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns review – Dylan, Hendrix, Joplin and the wonder of Woodstock

A kind of Lourdes for musicians – stories of songwriting brilliance, hipster shysters and extraordinary excess abound in this enjoyable study of the New York upstate village

First things first: I live in Woodstock, I was interviewed for this book, and I know the author. I was at school with him, in fact, an establishment next to Westminster Abbey not generally known as a rock academy and yet in our day home to several incipient rockers, including Thomas Dolby and, in the brief period before his expulsion, my own teen bandmate, Shane MacGowan. The boarders all had record players and there was a constant current of rock music drifting down with the dope fumes from study windows over Little Dean’s Yard: Dylan, the Band, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, Todd Rundgren … I didn’t know it at the time but much of it – perhaps even most of it – had been put together in the little upstate New York village I ended up living in 20 years later. I didn’t go there for the music, but after reading Barney Hoskyns’s fascinating account of the epic influence and mysterious magnetism of this Dibley-sized corner of the Catskill mountains, I understand a little better why I stayed.

It is not scenically glamorous by American standards: the round-topped mountains look more slumped than soaring; the buildings are ramshackle (there is none of the rigorous beauty of New England villages), and most people live surrounded by thick woods with no views and little sunlight, which gives everything a dank, musty quality, at least in winter. Failed endeavours of one kind or another dot the landscape – the burned hulk of the old Overlook Mountain hotel that never quite became the grand resort it was intended to be (rattlesnakes in the billiard table, among other things), or the partially abandoned Byrdcliffe Arts colony that drew the first generation of bohemians to the area in the 1900s. Failure is very acceptable here. Dylan’s “no success like failure” – a line written during his four-year Woodstock sojourn – captures the downbeat, comfortingly contrarian local spirit, along with its touch of smugness. But there is another side to it too: a frailly defiant charm that becomes more apparent in spring when the creeks melt and the dogwoods blossom along the lanes, and that in summer casts a spell of deepest enchantment. As Maria Muldaur, another sometime resident, told Hoskyns: “There’s some mojo there.”

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