Culture

Matt Busch saw his first Grateful Dead concert at Madison Square Garden on Sept. 14, 1988. “I was hooked right away,” he said. The following February, Wetlands Preserve opened at 161 Hudson St. in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood. Busch figures he was around 16 when he started sneaking into the music venue and bar. […]

Five years ago, piano broker Robert Friedman, known as “the Steinway Hunter,” stumbled upon Thomas Edison’s piano while browsing a Long Island estate sale website. Today, the instrument sits in Rondavid Gold’s Woodstock home, where musicians gathered Sunday, Oct. 4, for a concert benefiting the Jewish Federation of Ulster County. About 40 people attended Gold’s […]

Cindy greeted people as she normally did. Parking lot staff and part-timers smoked cigarettes and talked about the old nights as cars came in. The smell of cannabis hung in the air. It was a beautiful, chilly evening on Sept. 25, ahead of the nor’easter, and around 50 or so music fans had gathered at […]

Woodstock band Big Deep will play a free show Saturday, Aug. 22, on the front porch of Happy Life Productions as part of the Woodstock Music Walk. The performance begins at 6 p.m. at 59 Tinker St. The Music Walk will feature about 30 musicians performing outside businesses throughout town. Band members plan to meet […]

Decades ago, bass player Dave Holland was summoned to the U.S. to perform with the legendary Miles Davis, who had seen him play at Ronnie Scott in London and wanted him for a gig at Count Basie’s in Harlem.   A drummer who had struck up a friendship with Holland in London met him at the […]

Roy Blumenfeld was born in the Bronx, grew up in Yonkers, and spent weekends as a teenager at his family’s home on Ohayo Mountain Road in Woodstock. Now 82, Blumenfeld will return Friday, July 24, to perform at Bearsville Theater with The Blues Project, the band he co-founded more than six decades ago. The show […]

Two Bearsville Theater headliners played a free, unannounced show Saturday afternoon for about 200 jam band fans on Tinker Street in Woodstock. The guitar-and-vocal duo featured Grahame Lesh, son of the late Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, and Daniel Donato, whose Cosmic Country band has built a loyal following nationwide. The two performed for more […]

The Bobby Lees had already told fans they might be finished when Jason Momoa called. The Woodstock garage-punk band is the focus of the season premiere of “On the Roam,” Momoa’s HBO Max docuseries, which returned May 14. The episode follows the band through a precarious stretch: after warning fans in 2023 that the economics […]

The great lake now called Superior is shaped like the profile of a wolf, with Isle Royale as its eye and Duluth at the tip of its nose. There, on May 24, 1941, Abram and Beatrice Zimmerman welcomed their first child, Robert Allen Zimmerman. The boy from Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, would become Bob Dylan, […]

Jen Donovan, owner of Le Shag hair salons in Woodstock and Kingston, met Mercury Rev guitarist and co-founder Sean Mackowiak in 2004, when she was styling hair in Uptown Kingston and he had a studio on Wall Street. Mackowiak, known as Grasshopper, was among the musicians who spent time at the salon where Donovan worked, […]

For all of Woodstock’s reputation for nurturing artists, musicians, and innovators, one tradition stands out: the weekly drum circle on the Village Green. “What lies at the center of these events is the sheer frivolity of it,” Kevin Johnson, 72, a trained drum circle facilitator who coordinates the circle on Sundays from 4 p.m. to […]

A much younger Bruce Ginsberg was helping renovate a holistic healing center in Arizona in 1978 when he struck up a friendship with basketball star and Grateful Dead superfan Bill Walton, who was recovering from a season-ending fractured ankle. That’s how Ginsberg ended up as Walton’s backstage guest that summer at a Dead show at […]

When BERTHA: Grateful Drag brought its all-drag Grateful Dead tribute to Bearsville Theater on March 25, the performance blended improvisation, activism, and theatricality. After the show, Jacob Groopman—also known as Big Sissy Bertha—spoke about the band’s origins, politics, and what they hope audiences take away. BERTHA has been described as the world’s first Grateful Dead […]

Woodstock multi-instrumentalist Zach Djanikian was onstage with Graham Nash in September 2024, preparing for soundcheck, when his cell phone rang. The call was from his childhood friend, Ben Feldman. Years earlier, as Djanikian set out on a music career, Feldman became an attorney before making a sharp turn to pursue filmmaking. Now Feldman had a […]

As a teenager, Jim Weider worked at a stereo shop in downtown Woodstock called the Sound In. Weider said the shop was run by Kermit Schwarz, a local character beloved by local musicians of the time, was known for smoking three cigarettes at a time who often sported a ring of the antacid Maalox around […]

When Storey Littleton takes the stage at Levon Helm Studios on Jan. 31, opening for Cornelia Murr, the setting will be familiar. She has been playing music in that room since childhood. What is new is the timing. Her debut album, “At a Diner,” arrives on Feb. 8, marking her first full step forward as […]

The Bearsville Theater will host two nights of music and remembrance Wednesday and Thursday to honor Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead guitarist and co-founder who died Saturday and whose decades-long career left deep roots in the Hudson Valley. Wednesday’s event, titled “A Gathering to Celebrate the Life and Music of Bob Weir,” is free but […]