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, one of the most chronicled artists of the 20th century. But one part of his story remains more quietly embedded in local memory: the years he spent in Woodstock and Bearsville, where he wrote, recorded, raised a family, sought privacy and became part of the town’s mythology.
As Dylan turns 85 on Sunday, his ancient footprints remain all over Woodstock—in its cafes, music rooms, birthday tributes, stories and, not least, in the building now occupied by The Overlook, where Dylan once lived and wrote above the Café Espresso.
Dylan was born in Duluth while the world was at war. Abe and Beatty Zimmerman lived there while their son was a toddler and was joined by a little brother, David, born in 1946. Bob was born with big blue eyes and a full head of dark curls. He wore overalls and sensible leather shoes, and rode his tricycle along the alley running horizontally next to his family’s home—nice and level, unlike the street in front.
Soon the Zimmermans left Duluth and moved to Hibbing, 75 miles inland in the mountains of the Mesabi Range, where his mother’s family owned the Lybba Theater and a clothing store, Stone’s. His father’s family owned an appliance and furniture store, Zimmerman Furniture and Electric.
Bob grew up surrounded by family and friends—almost 400 people attended his bar mitzvah at the Androy Hotel—and loved listening to music on his radio. He sought out strange stations from afar late at night, and bought the records he liked most to play again and again in the room he shared with David. He even had a small portable television on which he could watch performers on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Jackie Gleason Show.”
After high school, Bob went to the University of Minnesota—quite briefly—and spent most of his time in Dinkytown with new friends like Tony “Little Sun” Glover, Dave “Snaker” Ray, and “Spider” John Koerner, listening to folk and the blues. In the bitter winter of January 1961, he arrived in New York City. For the next decade, he made his life in New York state, when he was not touring the world as Bob Dylan—first as one of the most popular folksingers of the Greenwich Village scene, and then as the genuine rock ’n’ roll star he had wanted to be since he was a boy.
The story of Bob Dylan after that has been told many times. Less often told is how soon he found his way to Woodstock and Bearsville, and how deeply the people and places here shaped his life and art.
Albert Grossman helped make this come to pass. Grossman was a Chicago-born economist turned club manager who saw what was happening around the fountain in Washington Square every weekend and began shaping the folk scene for global consumption early. He accepted George Wein’s offer to get involved with the brand-new Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and then put together and managed a folk supergroup in 1961: Mary Travers, raised in the Village and a professional singer from her school days; Paul Stookey, stand-up comic and coffeehouse legend already; and Peter Yarrow, whose family owned a cabin near Woodstock and whose ties to the area continued all his life. The trio eventually formed Peter, Paul and Mary.
Yarrow let Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo come up and hang out in the cabin, where, Rotolo recalled, “we drank Médoc, Saint-Emilion, and good-quality Italian wines. Peter and I did most of the cooking.” They relaxed together there before Newport in 1963, where Peter and Suze painted, and Dylan played the piano constantly. He had no regular access to one in the city.
“At the cabin he kept a notebook beside him on the piano bench as he worked on songs, which were coming out of him rapid fire, his focus and skill making the work seem effortless,” Rotolo said.
A lady on the street in town suspected Yarrow of dating Travers when she saw Suze and Peter walking together.
Travers was, in fact, seeing another man at the time: photographer Barry Feinstein. Feinstein and Dylan became good friends that summer, when they drove Grossman’s Rolls-Royce back to New York from Denver, where it broke down that August.
With a growing group of friends in town, and his manager having purchased a vast amount of property on the hill above and in the center of Bearsville, Dylan began spending more and more time in and around Woodstock. After he and Rotolo broke up—or, more likely, while they were still technically together—Dylan began bringing Joan Baez for visits. He had his own cabin on Grossman’s home complex on Striebel Road.
He also had a little place in town, where he lived and wrote above the Café Espresso, thanks to Bernard and Mary Lou Paturel. He roamed the area with pals Bobby Neuwirth and Victor Maymudes, shooting pool in Kingston and going out dancing without being recognized. A beautiful blonde waitress at the Espresso regularly accompanied them, and she remembers Dylan summoning her upstairs to hear parts of what would become “Tarantula.” She was, as one would be, entertained but baffled by it.
Soon he and Albert were romantically involved with women who were good friends, Sara Lownds, who was separated from photographer Hans Lownds, and Sally Buehler. When Albert and Sally married in Bearsville in November 1964, Sara was matron of honor and her daughter Maria their flower girl. When Sara and Bob married almost exactly a year later, they moved together into Dylan’s cabin, but soon got a place of their own for a fast-growing family.
The Dylans bought a Byrdcliffe Colony house, Hi Lo Ha, and lived there until its remoteness was no longer a guarantee against the dangers of fame. Another home on more acres up Ohayo Mountain was also untenable, in the end.
Clearly they loved it here in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Bob recording and making music with neighbors like Happy Traum and the men who traveled with him on his 1966 world tour, known to us all as The Band. The Dylans hosted friends including George and Pattie Boyd Harrison, who came for Thanksgiving in 1968. George spent most of the time playing with the children during the holiday meal.
Dylan also filmed his own French New Wave-western mashup movie under the inspiration of Feinstein and Yarrow’s wacky film shot in part in Woodstock, “You Are What You Eat.” Dylan’s movie stars many of the same locals, as well as Tiny Tim. Dylan had seen Tiny Tim perform in the Village at the Living Theater and invited him up for a very cold winter movie shoot of which little has yet been released.
I hope the Bob Dylan Center, which holds the footage, will soon let the world see Rick Danko playing pinball, Richard Manuel smiling the world’s most dazzling smile while he listens to Bob playing the piano on an outdoor porch at the Hi Lo Ha guest cottage, Garth Hudson beatifically resting on bleachers out in a quiet field, and Dylan romping down the Grossmans’ snowy driveway with his joy-filled dog, Hamlet.
The Dylans had two children at the Kingston hospital. A friend of theirs and mine, who was in Sara’s weekly crochet circle, babysat Maria and Jesse while Anna was being born. They likely would have stayed here to raise their family. But Dylan’s celebrity ruined Woodstock for them.
In his memoir “Chronicles: Volume One,” you can still feel his anger at the trespassers who invaded their privacy and scared his family.
“I wanted to set fire to these people. These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life….Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place of chaos.”
The family moved back to New York City and then to Malibu, though Dylan continued—and perhaps continues—to own property in town.
He may have left long ago after calling Woodstock home for most of a decade, but his face and lyrics are on merchandise for sale all over town. On the walls of restaurants and cafes, and are the basis for many a locally supplied tattoo. Plenty of people who knew Dylan when he lived here, and later, remain in town: friends and lovers, musicians who traveled with him, producers who helped make his records, fellow artists who painted with him.
For many years, Happy Traum, and then Connor Kennedy, organized a tribute concert in honor of Dylan’s birthday. As the man turns 85, there are two in town.
Professor Louie & The Crowmatix will honor both our beloved Levon Helm, who never left town and was born on May 26, and Dylan at The Colony on May 29. At the Woodstock Playhouse on May 24, Jami D. has organized “Forever Young: The Music & Back Pages of Bob Dylan,” which promises to be a Rolling Thunder-style entertainment revue.
However you choose to celebrate Bob Dylan when his birthday comes, do it. Listen to the songs he is still performing, read some of his writing—he’s a Nobel Laureate in Literature after all—strike a match and light a candle, raise a glass.
Here at The Overlook, we need only sit quietly in the office—in the very space where Dylan once composed songs, poems and free-form thoughts while neighbors enjoyed their food and drink below—and play “Forever Young,” a song inspired by something Rick Danko’s partner Elizabeth once said to Dylan, while the stream flows on and on.
Anne Margaret Daniel is a contributing writer for The Overlook, an editor and a literature professor at The New School in New York, where she regularly teaches a course on the art of Bob Dylan. She lives in Woodstock with her husband and their sweet rescue dogs. Send correspondence to reporting@theoverlooknews.com.