Even before the festival made the name world-famous, Woodstock—the village!—was something of a waking dream. Bob Dylan’s presence had changed things drastically, and two legendary graphic designers, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, already had homes here.

An unstoppable young émigré named Peter Max had not only tapped into this flower-power hour but branded it nationally. In doing so, he managed to perpetuate the ’60s psychedelic moment well into this high-anxiety century and become fabulously wealthy.

Max died Monday, Sept. 14, at 88 in a New York City hospital after years of living with dementia. Back in 1971, however, already kicking ass in his remarkable climb, he arrived in Woodstock.

He came to visit a fellow follower of Swami Satchidananda named Ron Merians. Ron had recently walked away from a career as a photographer, taking his right-hand man, Richard Fusco, with him. Richard would become a foundational mainstay of WDST. The two had converted the burned-out remains of an ice cream parlor on the main drag into a juice bar. It soon morphed into a legendary nightclub, the Joyous Lake, in the space now occupied by Silvia’s.

“I first met Peter in early ’69,” Richard recalled. “I was working with Ron as his assistant in his photography studio in New York City. Peter and Ron were close friends.”

One assignment was to photograph Peter’s merchandise: bedsheets, dishes, umbrellas, and much more, for a double-page spread in Ad Age. When Ron and Richard moved to Woodstock to open the Joyous Lake, Peter got a house here and became a fixture at the club.

Peter would eventually buy several houses in Woodstock. According to his real estate agent, Valerie Cashen Marotta, he gave one to his first wife, Liz. Even after he could no longer visit, his staff kept his own house perfectly maintained, as if awaiting the master’s return. His family finally sold it five years ago.

Peter stopped regularly visiting Woodstock in the early 1980s, after Ron’s marriage ended and Ron left town. A highly charismatic character himself, Ron became one of the people representing Peter’s work in New York City. Peter returned for Ron’s 1989 memorial, “One in a Minion,” held in Magic Meadow atop Meads Mountain. The Woodstock chapter of Peter’s life seemed to draw to a close.

Until, that is, a brash newcomer named Tom Fletcher cold-called the pop-art legend in New York City. To the astonishment of his fellow gallerists, Peter agreed to a solo show coinciding with Woodstock ’94, held seven miles down Route 212 in Saugerties.

As if drawn by the Pied Piper, a throng of admirers followed Peter out of the packed Fletcher Gallery, where the show soon sold out. Blocking traffic on both sides of Mill Hill Road, they cheered as Peter whipped out his ever-ready Sharpie and signed a psychedelically painted school bus gassing up at the now-defunct Mobil station across the street.

Peter’s connection to the Woodstock festivals predated his arrival in town. He brought Swami Satchidananda to the original festival in 1969, where the spiritual teacher opened the gathering by inviting the crowd of around half a million toward higher consciousness through chanting and meditation.

Thirty years later, Peter designed the stage artwork for Woodstock ’99, which descended into violence and destruction. The first festival embodied the flower-power promise he had helped put into pictures. The last offered a far darker scene.

Before becoming the Zelig of Woodstock, Bruce Milner—whose band had a top 10 hit in 1967—was a dentist to the stars in Manhattan. One of them, naturally, was Peter Max.

“Peter didn’t ever need much more than a cleaning,” Bruce told me at the end of a long day. “That wolfish grin held up beautifully. But he sent me several of his assistants while bartering for all that dental work with Peter Max paintings.”

Several jumped off the walls of the Transcend Dental office where we sat.

“Peter had many, many assistants,” Bruce recalled, “mostly paid with Peter Max works as well. It was like he’d created his own self-perpetuating currency!”

Peter’s headquarters were on West 65th Street, between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West.

“I would get buzzed in on the ground floor of his gigantic headquarters. And you would not believe the activity of that place!”

Bruce shook his head, remembering.

“Peter would occasionally give me a tour of his archive in which even a doodled cocktail napkin—signed, of course—was preserved.”

Bruce recalled Peter going vegan and looking wonderfully changed under the influence of his second wife, Mary. Peter took Bruce out for several meals no animal suffered to provide.

“I used to live to eat,” Peter told him, as Bruce remembered it. “Now I eat to live.”

“Peter was well aware that I’d maintained my chops as a keyboard player,” Bruce recalled. “He always had a small recording studio set up in the back room and encouraged me to play. Naturally, I’d gravitate to Ringo’s Peter Max-painted baby grand.”

Bruce smiled widely.

“Peter would sometimes join in—he was pretty good! He always painted with music playing—many artists do—but a big part of Peter’s ‘work’ was…well, waitaminute.”

Giant cellphone in hand, Bruce called Joan Baez’s manager, Bernie Gelb. Five minutes later, I was introduced.

As Bernie put it: “The truth is, I think Peter enjoyed ‘making the deal’ and handlen his work as much or more than actually creating it.”

Handlen: Yiddish for bargaining, trading, or haggling.

Bernie pointed me toward another source: “As for your other questions, you really want to speak to my wife, Mimi, who is a marriage counselor and sex therapist and is in session at the moment.”

It turns out Mimi had been Peter’s assistant for decades before becoming a therapist. She asked that I include this:

“Peter was brilliant, kind, gentle, and forgiving and gave his work to so many charities, hoping to make the world a better place.”

For years, Mimi, sometimes accompanied by Bernie, visited Peter several times a year as his dementia progressed. Bernie recalled one bedside visit when Peter, who had appeared unconscious, suddenly raised his right hand and index finger at the sound of Mimi’s voice.

“We haven’t seen Peter respond to anyone like that in quite some time,” Bernie recalled a member of the staff telling them.

Back at Bruce’s office, it was time to lock up.

“The terrible irony of it being,” Bruce reflected, “is that after having created this larger-than-life persona, Peter—for who knows how many years?—didn’t even know who he was.”

Here in Woodstock, however, other images endure: Peter at the Lake; Peter bidding his dear friend Ron goodbye in Magic Meadow; Peter, his Sharpie in hand and a hometown crowd spilling into the street, blessing a psychedelically painted school bus.

Peter, a high priest of heart-art. A giving, living legend.

Tad Wise is a contributing writer. Send correspondence to reporting@theoverlooknews.com.