When I mentioned our problem finding a rehearsal space to Albert, he said, “I think you guys really should consider finding a place up in Woodstock.” I hadn’t forgotten that Sally had mentioned this a few weeks before, so when Bob asked me to come up to Woodstock again to see how the film was progressing, I figured I’d see what he thought about the idea. By now he and Howard Alk were halfway through the film, but looking a little weary. Their technique had produced interesting results, but it was extremely tedious and time-consuming. The good news was that Bob was recovering from his injury really well: he only had to wear the neck brace part-time now and could turn his head without turning his whole body. He suggested Richard, Rick, and Garth come up to Woodstock too and we could play some music and maybe do some more filming as well.
It felt good for us all to be together again, playing some tunes and having some laughs. Bob liked the idea of us moving up there, so Rick went on a mission to search out what we were looking for, usually dragging Richard along. The idea was to find a clubhouse—a place where the guys could live with a space for us to make music. Dominique and I were the only couple, so we would get a separate place.
Howard asked me to sit and look closely at the footage that he and Bob had cut so far, then to go through the scenes they had pulled to use in the second half. I took notes and absorbed as much as I could. After we’d run through it, Bob came in. He said he was burned out working on the film and was going to take the family to Jamaica for a little breather. “Why don’t you and Howard finish up the second part?” he suggested. “It’s all there, you just gotta put it together.”
He knew I was a movie bug and thought I could help Howard with structure. Let’s put together a sequence of the choices you’ve pulled and see what flows, I said. We’ll juggle scenes around until it feels right. That simplicity appealed to Howard—he too felt the procedure for the first half had been grueling.
In a couple of weeks, with Bobby Neuwirth’s help to keep us on the path, we had a rough cut of the second half. Bob came back from his vacation, put the finishing touches on the film, and it was done. There was a wild sense of humor to this film that we realized might fly over the heads of the public. The attitude was something like “We’re not going to give you what you want. We’re going to give you what you need.” When Albert screened it for ABC Television, their response was “Are you crazy? We can’t show this on television. It’s too weird. Nobody will get it, and we don’t get it.” The film was called Eat the Document and that’s exactly what ABC-TV did.
—
One day Rick came bounding into the “Red Room” at Bob’s house, where we sometimes played music. “I think I found it!” said Rick. “It’s very private. You wanna go see?” We drove to West Saugerties and up a remote side road to a long driveway. When we turned in, there it was: a pink ranch-style house in the middle of a hundred acres—a ridge of mountains, a good-sized pond, and nothing but space and wilderness all around.
The house was modestly furnished with essentials, just enough for a quick move-in, and ready to go. A large fireplace greeted us, and on the mantel was a decorative device put there by the landlords. Standing about eight inches tall and a foot wide was a picturesque lowlands scene with a river running through it to distant mountains. When Richard hit a little switch on the side of the device, the river lit up as if it were flowing. It told you quite a bit about the people we’d be renting from.
Richard rejoiced. “This could be just what we need.”
I agreed. “Let’s take it!” The slightly ugly pink house had four bedrooms, a dining area, a kitchen, a living room, and a basement. That was my focus: turning that subterranean space into what we’d needed all along. The goal was to use whatever gear we could from our live show to create a setup that would let us discover our own musical path. Lay some rugs down and kill the sound reflection. Get an upright piano in there with a mic for the soundboard and one for a vocal. Guitar amp and acoustic guitar mics. One mic over the drums—in case anybody played drums. Another few vocal mics for Rick, me, or Bob. Who knows! Garth had all this going through a little mixer with another mic for his Lowrey organ’s Leslie speaker. I brought over the little quarter-inch tape machine I’d been using at Bob’s house. The only effect was an Echorec tape delay, which was a bit noisy with hiss, but who cared? This was it! This was what I’d been looking for in my dreams.
I was drawn to the idea of the records that Les Paul made with his wife, Mary Ford, at his home studio in New Jersey, which I had heard was built into the side of a hill. Those records had a sound unlike anything the world had ever heard before. And I remembered the time we visited Hitsville, the legendary Motown studio. It had lit a spark in me—just how simple, how basic the place was, so underplayed, and yet the sound that came out couldn’t have been more distinctive and special.
When I asked a recording engineer to take a look at the basement, he said the concrete walls, glass basement windows, and big metal furnace could make for the worst sound anybody ever used for recording music. To me, that was good news. This was all about breaking the rules, and the more unacceptable the setting, the more it felt right. I was looking forward to discovering what this big pink house had in store for us.
Sara Dylan had found a little gray house for Dominique and me on Glasgow Turnpike, several miles from the pink house. We moved in with our cats, Maybelle and Matt. Woodstock was a drastic change in lifestyle for us, and for the guys. We knew it could work for our musical needs, but there was a sense of isolation in the countryside. Everything seemed so far away. None of us had a vehicle. So we decided to go in together on a 1940 dark burgundy four-door Hupmobile with front suicide doors—pretty rare, and it ran real nice. We enjoyed cruising around town in it. But the car lived with the boys at their place, and Dominique and I quickly realized that if no one was around to pick us up, we were pretty much stranded. Our house was too far from town for walking. So every day the guys would swing by and bring me back to our new clubhouse, “Big Pink,” as we started calling it.
Slowly but surely, the basement setup started coming together. Every day Garth and I tried moving equipment around and testing mics. We didn’t have much to work with, so we had to beg, borrow, or steal whatever gear we could. We got half a dozen Norelco mics, also a couple little Altec mixers and two speakers for playback listening. Albert helped us with another mic or two, and Garth got a pair of headphones so he could adjust the levels on the mics through the mixer. We plugged the main vocal mic into my guitar Echorec machine. Surprisingly, it added just enough pizzazz to make the room feel like it had its own sound.
Our routine at Big Pink quickly took shape. Every morning, Rick or Richard would come by and get me and we would mess around with music ideas in the basement. Richard came up with some nice chord changes and was working on lyrics. He always wrote music first and then went in search of words that fit. I would sometimes start with a first line or title, maybe a rhythm, anything I could grab onto. Every couple of days we’d audition something for one another. On occasion we’d refer to a song or piece of music we’d shared in the past as a point of reference. “Remember that gospel song by the Caravans? Well, this is inspired by that.” Or “Remember that break in ‘Tossin’ and Turnin’?” What we played rarely resembled the reference, but it was part of the creative process. No genre of music, no influence was off limits, and the sense of freedom this gave us was exhilarating.
I couldn’t wait to take Bob out to West Saugerties to visit Big Pink. He picked me up in his blue station wagon. (Only a few years earlier he’d been using it to drive himself to gigs.) He had his dog, Hamlet, with him—a big black German shepherd/poodle mix with curly fur and a distinct funky smell. As we cruised toward Big Pink, I told him about our clubhouse music-factory concept, and that the boys and I thought we were onto something. Bob had recorded mostly in proper studios, and I didn’t know yet if he could relate to this idea.
As we trailed up a long side road, I rolled down my window to l
et some of Hamlet’s scent escape. “Where is this place?” Bob asked, amused. “Man, nobody’s going to bother you out here!” He wasn’t wrong, but I liked the sense of privacy and solitude.
Richard had a pot of coffee brewing when we arrived, and Rick was stocking the refrigerator. “Just like home,” Garth remarked as he stood in the entrance with a screwdriver in hand. Bob looked the joint over like a sergeant appreciating a tidy barracks. When he saw the setup in the basement, he scratched his chin, looking pleased. “This is great. Can you record anything here?” In response, Garth played back some experimental taping we had done. Bob could feel our vibe loud and clear. He said there were a couple of song ideas he had kickin’ around and it would be good to try them out with us at Big Pink.
For the next few months, we would convene there. Bob would usually pick me up in the blue station wagon with Hamlet in the back, and we’d work from noon until about four thirty or five. For the first couple of weeks, he brought his Martin acoustic guitar and small portable typewriter with him every day. Eventually he just left them there. I usually got a ride home with one of the guys later so we could work on music ideas of our own after Bob had left.
In the living room there were some coffee tables and side tables scattered around. Checkerboards lived on two of the tables. Rick was the champion checkers player, in which he took a certain pride, while Richard was on a continuous challenge to win at solitaire without cheating. On the other tables in the living room we kept two typewriters. Some lyrics were written with a song on one side of the paper and another on the back. Drawing from Bob’s custom, it became a ritual for one of us to sit down at a typewriter and rattle off some lyrics or a poem or just a train of thought, most likely with a bit of humor to it.
When I look back on that particular period, we never seemed to have enough quarter-inch recording tape or typing paper. Pretty foolish, but it was what it was. I never saw Bob write out lyrics longhand; he either typed them out or scratched a couple of words on a napkin or something. His ability to improvise on a basic idea was truly exceptional and a lot of fun to witness.
—
Our long hours at Big Pink meant Dominique was often alone at our little house for most of the day. When I got back in the evening, it was plain to see she was feeling a little trapped. Sometimes she would go to Sara’s and hang out with her, and on occasion she went antique furniture scouting with Sally Grossman. Even if she came with me to Big Pink, there wasn’t a lot for her to do.
One day, on the way out to Big Pink, Bob said, “You and Dominique need some wheels. I’ll sell you this blue station wagon for a dollar. I got a new one coming.” The boys and I were still just getting by, so his offer was a godsend. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a one-dollar bill, and handed it to him. He took it and said, “Sold!”
There was a real family feeling between Bob and the Hawks up in the Catskills. He was a very special friend and co-conspirator. We were already survivors from our year of living dangerously on one of the craziest tours in history. Now we had our feet back on the ground and sanity reigned—some of the time.
Bob continued, “You take the car and I’m going to see if Rick wants to take Hamlet. You know, that dog loves Rick. They seem to have a connection, ever notice that?” Rick did agree to take Hamlet. He groomed and freshened him up, and once Bob and Sara saw the dog looking so fine, they thought perhaps they should take him back. “No way!” Rick objected. “He belongs to me now.” Hamlet became the Big Pink mascot. He would lie directly in front of our playback speakers. If he didn’t care for a tune we had just cut, he’d go upstairs and lie on the rug in front of the fireplace, a good incentive for us to try to do better the next time.
At Big Pink we had a new realization about Bob. You could hardly name a song he didn’t know all the words to, and you didn’t have to ask twice. He was turning us on to some beautiful folk songs—“The Auld Triangle,” “Ain’t No More Cane,” “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue,” and on and on. There was always room for a few country gems thrown in—“You Win Again,” “Waltzing with Sin,” “I Don’t Hurt Anymore”—and a good chance a couple of Johnny Cash tunes would slip in there too. I put in a request for “Big River” myself, and we tore up “Folsom Prison Blues.”
But all these old songs and rare gems were a warm-up to the main event. After a quick game of checkers, a coffee, and a smoke, Bob would sit down behind the typewriter. Sometimes that was a signal for me to hit the basement and get a couple of guitar parts going, making sure there was tape on the machine. We were always afraid of running out of tape and were too poor to buy extra, so we recorded on a slow speed, seven and a half inches per second, or maybe three and three quarters if we were running really low. On this particular Ampex tape machine, you could record on both sides of the tape, which helped, even though it meant a sacrifice in quality.
Pretty soon Bob and the other guys would descend the stairs and take their positions behind whatever instrument they felt like playing. I might play drums or bass, Garth would start tickling the ivories, Rick would grab a trombone or guitar, Richard on lap steel or percussion and drums. It would be a starting place. Bob had a music stand in front of his chair where he would set fresh lyrics, maybe scratch out something with a pen, or add a couple words. He would strum a little intro on the acoustic guitar, and away we’d go. “Too much of nothing can make a man ill at ease, one man’s temper might rise, while another man’s temper might freeze.” More often than not, we would have a tough time making it to the end of the song without breaking up laughing.
Nominally the logic behind these recordings was to put together a collection of new Bob Dylan tunes that other artists might cover. After we would lay down a cut like “Too Much of Nothing,” Bob might comment, “Okay, that one would be good to send to Ferlin Husky.” He was only half kidding. The clubhouse concept was in full effect, and we loved having a creative depot to gather in. It reminded me of a street gang or the Bowery Boys movies, but instead of fighting, we played music. When we would bring friends by to check it out, they could feel the vibe right away: the place smacked of music.
Meanwhile Dominique and I were looking to upgrade our own place. Soon after we arrived in Woodstock we noticed that our kittens were no longer kittens. They were full grown, with their own personalities and attitudes. Within no time at all, hell set in. Maybelle went into heat and began howling at all hours. Cats from the area gathered outside and joined her, a terrible chorus that kept us up all night. Then, a surprise: Matt the Cat became Matt-ilda. It turned out Matt was a female, and soon she began howling louder than Maybelle. Dominique and I agreed we just had to hold steady and not let them out, regardless of the sleepless nights and constant anxiety. But after four nights of no sleep we were losing our minds and finally said, “The hell with it,” flinging the door open at 4:00 a.m. to preserve our sanity and get some shut-eye. The cats came in the next day like they had been to an all-night rage—haggard and bloody. They both scarfed down their food and fell asleep in their cat bed. Dominique and I looked at each other, knowing our troubles had just begun. Unsurprisingly, Maybelle and Matt-ilda soon were both pregnant, and we needed a bigger nest.
While Dominique went to Montreal for a family visit, I met with Norma Cross, the daughter of our old New York City landlord, and her friend Libby Titus. They showed me a cool, dark-wooded, two-story house on Larsen Lane between Woodstock and Bearsville. I liked the feel of the place much more than our pad on Glasgow Turnpike and said that I’d like to move in right away. In a room at the back of the house that you had to go out and around to enter, the guts of a baby grand piano lay on its side with its strings exposed, almost like a piece of art. I figured I might find some use for it.
I had started writing a song called “Caledonia Mission.” There was a Canadian town called Caledonia we would drive by on the way to Six Nations, and something about that place conjured up strange images and a story of estrangement and solitude in my imagination. Mostly I just liked the name.
I knew Rick’s vocal sound would be good for this song. Even the town where he was born and raised wasn’t far from Caledonia, so it felt like the right fit.
Richard had a tune in the works called “Katie’s Been Gone.” He had the chord progression and the first line. He asked me to finish the words and sort out the structure. I liked this kind of collaboration, in the tradition of classic composing pairs like Ira and George Gershwin or even Lennon and McCartney. It was a new method, writing with Richard. He wrote some beautiful melodies and changes and used piano chord inversions I didn’t even know.
Right around this time, Bob typed out the words to “Tears of Rage.” He handed it to Richard and said, “See if you can do something with this.” Richard nailed the perfect melody and chords to go with those heart-wrenching lyrics. He played it for Bob, who thought it sounded just right—“Let’s lay this down,” he said. We grabbed our instruments and Garth pressed “record” on the tape machine. Bob sang it good and we ran through it a couple of times, but Richard’s treatment and vocal made it his own. This was a breakthough for Richard’s writing, and it set a high bar that I wanted to live up to.
Dominique got back from Montreal and announced that she liked the rustic feel of our new house. She moved things around and made it more modern and comfy at the same time. When Rick saw what she had done to the place, he said they could use her help at Big Pink too. “Too many men and not enough charm,” he explained.
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