Small Town Talk

Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock

By: Barney Hoskyns

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

When musicians in the New York folk scene of the 1960s grew tired of city life, they decided to "get it together in the country". They headed for Woodstock - not to the site of the infamous music festival of 1969 but to the Catskills, to Bearsville, to Woodstock proper. Counterculture revolutionaries like Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, and Paul Butterfield got "back to the land", turning the once sleepy hollow into a funky Shangri-La.

Small Town Talk tells the town's musical history, from its earliest days as a bohemian arts colony to its ongoing life as a cultural satellite of New York. Woodstock, the bucolic artists' enclave, has earned its place in rock music history; Small Town Talk is a classic study of a vital music scene in a magical place during a revolutionary time.

©2016 Barney Hoskyns (P)2016 Tantor

Critic reviews

"[F]ans of 1960s and '70s rock and music history buffs will find this a pleasure." ( Kirkus)

A lot of answers to stories of my youth

I grew up in the town next to Woodstock a few years after a lot of the story took place. (I was 11 in 1969) The whole scene was the underlying pulse of my youth. We knew the personalities, and some of the stories, This narrative provides an excellent disquisition of the spiderweb that was the Woodstock scene possibly best told by someone outside of the world. The only minus was the pronunciation, of several locations.Notably Ohayo Mountain Road is not pronounced like the state between Pennsylvania and Indiana.

Too long

Interesting but repetitive. Could have told story in half the time. Also kind of a downer.

Captured the era - too many mistakes

How hard is it to find a reader or at least a producer who is familiar with the subject? As soon as the reader catches a stupid mistake then intimacy with the reader is shattered (he is not one of us - its hard to believe that he shares the same passion for the subject matter that the subject demands) I will give one example (you can hire me for more) - Paul Butterfield's "In My Own Dream" was not "subsequent" to "Keep On Moving." "Dream" (1968) was basically the same band as the record that preceded it (Pigboy Crabshaw) - and KOM saw the addition of a new bassist Rod Hicks and the incredible guitarist Buzzy Feiten. There was no question in the Woodstock of 69/70 that Buzzy was THE man on guitar in town. A lot of what this book has is probably correct and well researched but not all of it.

Great Content - Poor Narration

I enjoyed Barney Hoskyns’ history of Woodstock, NY and the many remarkable musicians who were influenced by and left their mark on this small town in the Catskills. I also came to appreciate the role Albert Grossman played in the creation of this artistic community.

However, I was disappointed in Mike Chamberlain’s narration of this book. He was just reading words, without knowledge of the subject. This was apparent in the many mispronunciations of names, locations, and words. I found the quality of his voice and delivery most annoying.

Cynical Dismantling of the Woodstock Spirit

I finished this book last Saturday. Later that evening, I attended the annual John Lennon Birthday Tribute in Manhattan, where virtually all the performers were related to the current musical scene in Woodstock -- no surprise, since the musical director is part of that scene. Weird that, since Barney Hoskyns make it seem as if the Woodstock music scene died with a whimper decades ago!

In a 13 hour audiobook, Hoskyns doesn't get it right until the very end -- not even in the Epilogue, in the Coda that comes after the Epilogue, no doubt tacked on after someone clued him in upon reading the finished book that he forgot something important. That something is that the Woodstock scene lives on, and it does so via the efforts (and, since his passing, the spirit of) Levon Helm.

Hoskyns had a clear choice about his approach to writing about Woodstock -- he selected Albert Grossman to be the star around which the Woodstock solar system would revolve, even relegating the town's big star Bob Dylan (whom Grossman managed before their falling out over Grossman ripping him off) to planetary status (one could argue that the bloviated Grossman was the true gas giant).

But Woodstock did not name its main highway after Albert Grossman, or even after Bob Dylan (who actually didn't stay there all that long). They named it after Levon Helm, the only American in the seminal Americana band, The Band. Levon stayed until the end, keeping things going with his recording studio and concert venue, The Barn, where the Midnight Rambles became legendary.

The Rambles continue on even after Levon's passing thanks to the wide range of musicians who make today's Woodstock music scene so vital -- and no surprise that a lot of that comes down from the Woodstock Mountain Revue, who even though they do get a full chapter in this book are otherwise shortchanged as perhaps the true heart of the scene back in the 1970s, after Dylan left and the Band went into decline.

In Barney Hoskyns's Woodstock, there is actually very little small town talk -- you learn almost nothing about the town's true denizens. He is intent only on dropping names -- and he's not even good at that, missing out on some rather big ones (David Bowie, cough cough) and inflating his word count with Wikipedia summaries of artists' musical output, even spending large chunks of time on music created elsewhere by people who may have spent a little time in Woodstock along the way.

Bottom line, Hoskyns has an agenda, to portray Woodstock as cynically as possible -- in short, equating Woodstock with the despicable Grossman, crassly commercial and exploitative with zero artistic talent of his own. There was a true spirit animal like Levon who could have been an emblem of the Woodstock nation's artistic contributions, its inclusiveness, its positivity -- the values that are still revered more than half a century after the famous festival took place (albeit 60 miles away).

But Hoskyns didn't realize it until the 11th hour (literally, the 12th hour of the audiobook), by which time he totally missed the boat. Take this one, if you must, with a huge grain of salt -- it's biased and inaccurate. I had it on my Wish List for a long time and finally got it on sale recently, and come away hugely disappointed.