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Sally Grossman (1939 – 2021): “She was filled with laughter and delight. I could see the love in his face.”
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Published: Mar 30, 2021
Category:
Beyond Classification
Sally Grossman died recently. She was the widow of legendary music impresario Albert Grossman, but that’s not why she got a New York Times obituary — in 1964, she was lounging in a red outfit in the background of the photo on the much discussed cover of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home. I was 18 when that record was released. I had a mild crushette and a lingering curiosity about her.
GUEST BUTLER TAD WISE has rewarded my curiosity. At 11, he was raking Bob Dylan’s leaves. Dylan drove him home once, and Tad emerged, in secret, a songwriter. He studied literature at Amherst, started a band in Woodstock, wrote a biographical novel on Nikola Tesla, and, with Robert Thurman, Circling the Sacred Mountain. For three decades, he wrote obituaries for the Woodstock Times. During the pandemic, he recorded a song diary with Jerry Marotta and Tony Levin: For The Record. And then one of the spiritual treasures of his town died….
On the morning of March 12, Sally Grossman, the widow of Bob Dylan’s foremost manager, Albert “the Baron of Bearsville” Grossman, failed to answer her locked front door. A spare key fetched, the Baroness was found at peace in her bed. While the cause of death has not been determined, Sally recently gave up cigarettes and seemed an unstoppable force at eighty one.
A first wave of obituaries concentrated on her Dylan cover. Old news! For Sally Grossman experienced her greatest triumph just as she was leaving us. Only a few days earlier she finalized the list of interviewees for a fully negotiated documentary based on her own vision of Albert Grossman’s life and legacy. Naturally, this would require explanation of their unique marriage — but on Sally’s terms! Furthermore, as early as 2014, Sally dispatched ace biographer Holly George-Warren to conduct several hundred hours of interviews for the first full biography of Albert. What other widow in recent memory has exerted such power over how the world would perceive a figure who’d changed it so profoundly?
Sally Ann Buehler was born in Manhattan on August 22, 1939 to parents who each had their own career. Sally and her brother were briefly sent to a professional children’s school. Saturday mornings the family watched Sally Ann star in a TV commercial for Silver Cup Bread, which aired each week as a sponsor of “Hopalong Cassidy” until the Buehlers decided, “This is no life for a kid.”
Sally attended Adelphi University and then Hunter College. In 1987 she told Rory O’Connor, “I used to see Albert Grossman around the Village when I was still a student in the beginning of the sixties.” Grossman had put together the folk super-group Peter, Paul & Mary, who took America by storm after recording a song by Grossman’s newest client, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” For the next decade Albert had the golden touch; his client list became the most impressive in popular music.
Sally was studying literature and cultural anthropology until both became living realities in the folk scene of Greenwich Village. She dropped out and took waitressing jobs at the Café Wha? and The Bitter End. Grossman frequented both. “Albert never even said hello to me. He was too purposeful.” That quickly changed.
A man of scintillating intelligence who reinvented the music industry while replacing pap with art, Albert intimidated the ill-prepared with an ominous, all-knowing stare. The young beauty at his side was a wordsmith whose ebullient conversation infallibly lifted Albert’s mood. “Sally was so enthusiastic, so inquisitive, so knowledgeable,” Peter Yarrow enthused over the phone. “She was filled with laughter and delight.”
Shirley and Milton Glaser tipped Albert off to a house for sale on a secluded hilltop in Bearsville. He purchased it, and in 1964 married Sally on the lawn. Dylan was staying at Peter Yarrow’s cabin with the newlyweds or crashing upstairs at The Espresso Café, while juggling two dark-eyed beauties, rather similar in looks to his manager’s bride. He’d piss off both his lovers, no doubt, by inviting Sally to the shoot in her own living room for the cover of “Bringing It All Back Home.”
Albert had taken Sally to Mexico by then. “Sally was always filled with the excitement of her adventures,” recalls Yarrow. “She was a brilliant student of worlds so disparate from the United States — worlds of feelings, and thought, and spirituality. She really wasn’t fully at home in the US as a place that really reached into the depths of her soul.”
Having convinced Albert to accompany her to India in 1967, Sally encountered “the Bauls of Bengal,” who burst into sacred song in a room at the Oberoi Grand Hotel in Kolkata, West Bengal. So began her more than forty year love affair with a sect that acknowledged no temple save the human body, and no teachings save those sung in devotion. “Some were like family to her,” travel companion Rhonda Granger, explains. But while the world was wondering at the Bauls on Dylan’s cover for John Wesley Harding, Sally performed a yearly pilgrimage to Bengal, and in 1971 produced Howard Alk’s “Luxmor Baul’s Movie.” She also developed a deep connection with the daughter of Albert’s clients, Maria and Geoff Muldaur, (who brought their baby Jenni to dinner, circa ’70). “[Sally] was gracious and beautiful and always looked after me,” Jenni wrote on Instagram. “She took me to India about 15 years ago to visit Baul singers in Kolkata. They do not make people like this anymore.”
How would Sally explain her absence from Bearsville for so much of her marriage? Peter Yarrow addresses the question with signature deference: “They were a great team. Their brilliance reflected back and forth until it was laser-like, but Sally internalized Albert’s downsides as well as his upsides. For all her courage and capacity Sally didn’t have the kind of tools Albert had to do what he did. And that’s a hard thing for somebody as gifted as she … to always stand in the shadows. Yet their love for one another was so extraordinary, they managed to set one another free, while remaining dear, loving, yet combative, life partners.”
By the end of 1970 Dylan had filed suit, Janis was dead, and Sally would later admit that Albert was “burnt out” on management: “He couldn’t wait to get out.” Wunderkind Todd Rundgren had been signed to produce Albert’s stable of artists at a gradually evolving Bearsville Studios, and Albert created Bearsville Records to bring that music to the world. Ian Kimmet, wooed from London in 1978 as second-in-command at Bearsville, witnessed a softer side of Grossman. “Albert would be up there in his office,” he recalls. “Sally would call from Oaxaca, and he’d just sit there alone in that room talking to her for hours at a time. He seemed devoted to her. I could see the love in his face.”
When Sally came home, Albert would show off a dozen improvements — tiny and grand — in the superb restaurants he’d built along the Sawkill. His greatest joys and frustrations nested in the huge barn he sought to transform into a fine restaurant adjoined to a gem of a theater. Something always needed to be torn out and rebuilt. Albert became so obsessed with the theater his client list dwindled. He couldn’t have cared less.
He’d bought tremendous acreage in Ulster County, but wouldn’t sell any of it. Informed by his accountant that he needed to make money, not spend it, Albert boarded “an important flight” for London on Jan. 25, 1986. He died of a heart attack before landing. Sally was devastated. At the funeral we looked away as tears glistened beneath her veil.
Then came a series of remarkable events.
Years earlier Andy Warhol gave his “Double Elvis” to Dylan, who traded it to Albert for a couch. After Albert’s funeral Sally auctioned the painting at Christie’s for close to a million dollars, every dime of which she spent completing Albert’s theater. It opened as home to River Arts Repertory, which boasted the premiere of Edward Albee’s last play.
When Ian Kimmet left briefly for Nashville, Sally took over Albert’s music businesses. In double coups, she put Rhino Records in charge of Bearsville Records, and had Warner Brothers administer Bearsville’s publishing. The studio became industry legend. Its clients included Cher, REM, The Divinals, The Pretenders, Simple Minds, Psychedelic Furs, The Dave Mathews Band, Ozzy Osbourne, The Indigo Girls, Joan Jett, Alice Cooper, Bryan Ferry, Joe Cocker, Iggy Pop, Metallica, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, Jeff Buckley, and Natalie Merchant — several of whom played concerts at the theater.
There were also three restaurants to maintain at his high standard. Sally stood by her dear friend, MarLee Wang, restauranteur at the Little Bear, and championed hometown heroes Peter Cantine and (Chef) Eric Mann, who brought the Bear Café to national attention. She later accepted their bid — which was second highest — to buy the entire property, knowing the Woodstockers would maintain Albert’s aesthetic. But what all owners until the present one failed to guard against was time. Lucky for Sally, then, that Lizzie Vann bought Albert’s neglected Xanadu, then spent that same amount restoring it.
Sally didn’t want her picture in the Theater — only Albert’s. Just the same, Lizzie has offered to host her memorial at a better-vaccinated moment. I fully expect an email from Sally refusing to attend. She has better things to do. She’s riding Glory’s train.
(Photo by Dion Ogust for Hudson Valley One, where this obituary appeared in a different form.)
