For Sale: A Chunk of Rock History
Big Pink is for sale. Three bedrooms, two baths and a basement full of rock ‘n’ roll ghosts.
The $149,000 asking price for an unremarkable shingled home in the hills above Woodstock may be a bargain or a bad joke--based on your reaction to the following word association test:
Bob Dylan. The Band. Summer of 1967. Great White Wonder.
Some readers may be puzzled, while others will cringe at the thought of yet another trip down boomer memory lane. But for millions of music lovers who grew up in the ‘60s, the historic partnership between Dylan and five back-up musicians in the basement of a Pepto-Bismol pink house is the stuff of legend.
It was here, from June through November of 1967, that they recorded 150 songs, including some of Dylan’s masterpieces: “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Tears of Rage,” “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “I Shall Be Released.”
None was intended for commercial sale, but the basement tapes surfaced in California two years later as “The Great White Wonder,” the first rock bootleg ever produced (“The Basement Tapes” finally were released officially by Columbia Records in 1975).
Meanwhile, The Band--the name adopted by Dylan’s back-up group--went on to record a critically acclaimed album of its own, “Music From Big Pink,” which featured a photo of the house on the back.
The legend of Big Pink soared. It was a home where timeless music had been made in a spirit of true creativity. But today, it’s just one more piece of Catskills real estate that hasn’t sold for years--a quiet landmark on a narrow mountain road.
Michael Amitin, Big Pink’s current owner, put the 1,834-square-foot house on the market two years ago but got no takers. A musician from New York City who originally bought the property as a vacation home, Amitin dropped the price from $165,000 and is convinced that someone, somewhere, will want to buy a piece of music history.
“The hip-hop generation does not know about Big Pink,” he concedes, “but it’s going to sell to somebody. When I first put the house up for sale two years ago, with some $10 ads, I got calls from people in England who were really interested.
“I also got a call from an investment banker in California who said: ‘Wow! Big Pink!’ But these guys never showed up.”
If they did, they would have found a casually furnished house that looks like it did in 1967. A crash pad for genius, a bachelor’s dream if you ever did see one. Close your eyes and you can picture six musicians, a sleeping German shepherd and piles of tape reels jammed into the 800-square-foot basement.
Then you can dig deep into your wallet and fantasize about a crazy purchase. Something your friends would not believe.
First, however, you have to find the place.
“Better follow me,” says Lori Schlichting, a realtor with Paradise Properties, after she meets visitors at a freeway offramp. “Folks can get lost here.”
That’s how Dylan and his pals wanted it when the basement sessions began. They rented Big Pink for $125 a month, mainly for its privacy and isolation, and things have stayed that way. Unlike other rock meccas--Graceland in Memphis, the Grateful Dead House in San Francisco--there are no busloads of tourists stopping in front of the home to gawk and buy T-shirts.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a bus chugging up the twisting, icy roads leading to the site. At one point, Schlichting’s small car stalls in a slushy snowbank and she has to be pushed back onto the road. You climb higher into the hills, until a bright pink house suddenly comes into view on the right.
“The Real Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame!” That’s how Amitin described his property in a local ad. Yet first impressions are surprising: Visually, Big Pink is nothing to write home about.
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It’s quiet, clean and ordinary. The outside view, made famous by the album cover, has not changed, and Amitin says he has done nothing to alter the appearance of the building, including the basement. But if you’re expecting a dramatic cellar that reeks of music history and celebrity, guess again.
In the years since Dylan and The Band left, Big Pink has been home to a variety of tenants, including a local guitar maker who used the basement to craft custom instruments.
Today, it’s the office of Parnassus Records, one of the nation’s oldest mail-order companies for classical music. The space is filled with shelves of obscure LPs and compact discs. Boxes stuffed with posters, videos and cassettes take up the remaining area; the company rents living space upstairs.
“For the first few weeks, I was pretty much in awe of what had once gone on here,” says Mark Zip, who works for the record company. “But then time passes and you get over it. This is a tract home in the middle of nowhere.”
Walk upstairs and you’re in the kitchen--a nondescript room with many of the same light fixtures and other decorative touches that existed in 1967. But it’s not just any kitchen, according to musical historians of the basement tapes.
“In the morning, Dylan would drop off his stepdaughter at preschool, head on up to Big Pink, put a large pot of painfully strong, high-octane coffee on the stove and sit at a typewriter [in the kitchen] tapping out words, ideas, lines, thoughts,” writes Clinton Heylin, author of “Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, 1960-1994” (St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
“Around noon, he would begin to rouse the comatose Band members with flagons of 90-proof caffeine. They would then sit around and smoke some weed before the music-making began.”
They’d play late into the night, rehearsing songs that Dylan had written that same morning. The sessions burned with a wild, careening spontaneity--bits and snatches of tunes by Johnny Cash, Leadbelly, folkies, pop crooners and assorted bluesmen. Some numbers lasted only a few seconds; others were painstakingly recorded three times until Dylan was satisfied.
Along the way, he touched on timeless themes in the dark Americana of roots music: death ballads, despairing love songs, tunes of betrayal and mayhem, ribald, innuendo-filled rockers.
Toward the end of the year, The Band began recording demos that would highlight its own first album, turning the basement into a frenzied but friendly blur of music-making.
“Over summer and into the fall, songs came that saw Comedy and Tragedy sitting down for a long bout of arm-wrestling, a drunken mob cheering them on, bets flying, then sudden silence when the game got rough,” writes Greil Marcus in “Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes” (Henry Holt, 1997).
Marcus quotes a zany example: Band member Richard Manuel beginning a humorous riff on the chorus of Van Morrison’s “Gloria,” then segueing into “Gloria . . . In Excelsis Deeeeoooh . . . Day-OOOOH! Daylight come and me wan go home.”
The music was rich and insular. While the basement tapes were rolling, America was rocking with political unrest and pop upheaval. Thousands of soldiers were coming home from Vietnam in body bags; Newark and Detroit exploded with inner-city riots; Century City turned into a battleground between antiwar demonstrators and police; San Francisco, Los Angeles and other outposts produced new, mind-expanding rock ‘n’ roll.
But Big Pink was a haven, far removed from the noise. A year before, Dylan had suffered serious injuries in a motorcycle accident, and his entire creative view seemed to turn inward. No longer the rock provocateur, he was exploring more enduring, traditional themes, and The Band joined him for the ride.
When it was over, Dylan pushed into new musical territory and moved back to Greenwich Village. The Band flew to Los Angeles, holed up at the Chateau Marmont and began recording its album. Big Pink soon became a memory.
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“It was such an amazing but short time,” says Janet Minto (nee Planet), who then was married to Van Morrison and knew The Band members well. “Nobody had any money, and it was OK. Then, when they got successful, they all left that house behind.”
Ghosts in the basement. The reverie builds, as Mark Zip packs and unpacks old records. To him, the symbolism is apt.
“This place is only special for what was made in it, and that was a very long time ago,” he says. “These days, lots of people have forgotten. And, you know, it’s not like the mailman comes here every day and says, ‘Hey, this is Big Pink.’ ”
Upstairs, in the attic bedroom he rents, Kevin Lent is similarly unfazed. Lent helped run the sound system for a recent Band concert, but the 27-year-old cable TV repairman says the group’s original music is not his favorite.
“This isn’t really a big deal,” Lent says. “I don’t go around telling people that I live here.”
Amitin wishes he would. Anything to attract a buyer.
“People hear ‘Big Pink’ and they envision some mansion, a really huge place, and it’s not,” says the owner, who bought the house 20 years ago from the man who originally built it.
Otto Gramms, a German immigrant, constructed a small, solid home on the site in 1962 but was forced to sell it when his wife’s health failed. Since then, health and financial pressures have Amitin trying to unload the house as well.
“Some people think they’d be making a million-dollar investment to buy this place,” he says. “Well, damn it, I’m 53, I have a few health problems and I want to sell it!”
Do people care? Only time will tell. But some neighbors are decidedly cool on the notion of Big Pink as a shrine.
“I think mythology has blown this thing up,” says Happy Traum, a folk musician and longtime Woodstockian who socialized with Dylan and The Band during the basement tape sessions.
“If you have a diamond ring in a box and you take it out, what’s the box worth?” he asks. “It was a special time, and they could have made this music in a field or anywhere else.”
But they made it in the basement. When he looked back on those sessions in 1969, Dylan told Rolling Stone Editor Jann Wenner that the surroundings had created their own mystique.
“They were a kick to do,” he said. “And you know, that’s really how to do a recording--in a peaceful, relaxed setting, in somebody’s basement, with the windows open and a dog lying on the floor.”
