NEARLY 75 YEARS AFTER FIRST OPENING, THE LEGENDARY VENUE AND ITS HISTORY COME ALIVE
AUG 24
By Dan McCarthy
IT’S A THICK, HOT SATURDAY AFTERNOON and I’m approaching Race Brook Lodge’s poolside patio and enclosed porch area in Sheffield. I’m about to meet David Rothstein, a local cultural elder statesman, if there ever was one. Adjacent to the patio is a mixed-use greenhouse/storage shed. A wood sign with “Music Inn” painted in white and green sits on the ground, leaning against the building. I’m in the right place.
Rothstein, owner and proprietor of the Music Inn in Lenox from 1970 until its final run of outdoor twilight concerts in the summer of 1979, is obscured by shadows. Through the porch screen, I see an unfocused figure motion and call me into the room. My eyes adjust, and Rothstein comes into focus, standing beside a long wooden table with a spread of vintage photos, music bills, show lineups, articles, and other memorabilia intended to be presented presumably to me, but really for anyone interested in music and American cultural history. One snapshot is worth a million words to come—it’s of a green-and-white-striped tent with tiny figures on a stage and a solid mass of people within an outdoor amphitheater under the Berkshire sky. We’ve got a lot to talk about.
I had arrived because the Music Inn was back in the local conversation. The Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington is hosting a reunion of sorts on Sunday, August 11, about the legacy and history of the Inn. The lineup includes a series of panel discussions; two 90-minute documentaries and short videos about the Music Inn that include highlights of past reunions; and an overall celebration of the legacy of the landmark Berkshire venue.
Luckily, the story of the Music Inn isn’t chiefly locked in the mind of one living person. There is a wealth of information on its official nonprofit archives page (which Rothstein has helped curate), housing an array of photo collections through the years. And yet, here before me is the living talisman of the Inn’s memory. I barely finish saying “hello” when Rothstein turns on the firehose of memories that pour out of him as if triggered by a triphammer in a nearly hour-long soliloquy-as-oral-history of the Music Inn, the hippie movement, The Music Barn, the rise of Tanglewood, the Rhode Island mafia, the Gilded Age cottages, American counterculture of the late-’60s through the entire ’70s, Bruce Springsteen, Kripalu’s origins, Wheatleigh, the Jesuits, Blantyre, Bousquet Mountain, tangling with town selectman over sound and the residual cultural blowback of Woodstock in Stockbridge, The Kinks, the charming foul mouth of Kris Kristofferson, and how everything ties back to the tract of land and the uniquely Berkshires cultural institution that was the Music Inn.
To those who remember it, the Music Inn carries the gravitas one would expect after absorbing the broad strokes of its life from its birth in the 1950s through its ending in 1979. How is this story not more well-known beyond Berkshire County and in the national zeitgeist as something like Woodstock is?
Seated before the archive of images and memorabilia at Race Brook, I had yet to even say much of a word when Rothstein turned to me. “So,” he offers, smiling warmly and settling into his chair, his shock of white hair making him seen grandfatherly as much as a mad scientist by way of Norman Mailer. “What do you want to know about the Music Inn?”
Inn Vogue
Wheatleigh is a 19th-century, 33-room room mansion occupied for 50 years by the daughter of the Count de Heredia, a Spanish nobleman, politician and diplomat. It was modeled on a 16th-century Italian palazzo, with sweeping vistas and gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York’s Central Park.
Only three years after the Boston Symphony Orchestra purchased Wheatleigh estate in Lenox in 1947—intending for the main house and 25 acres to be used as dorms for Tanglewood student fellows—the outbuildings and 100 acres of rolling hills and wide-open spaces were purchased by Stephanie and Philip Barber in 1950, seasoned Manhattanites in the world of fashion, business, theater, and the arts. They thought their friends and anyone visiting Tanglewood would need somewhere to stay, and the Barbers wanted a place where they could bring their New York crowds up and enjoy music and great company. It was the Barbers' vision and connection to live performance that began the musical journey of the Inn itself, as the resort began to be discussed in folk, jazz, and blues circles back in New York.
After the first live performance featured Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the Rev. Gary Davis, word of giants of the contemporary jazz world staying and playing at a small rustic inn in Western Massachusetts began to catch on. Marshall Stearns, a mercurial jazz critic of the day and future founder of the Institute of Jazz Studies, became involved in the early days of the Music Inn through the Barbers. He was leading the charge for a grand search among his peers and professional musicians to find a definition for jazz through an actual authoritative attempt to bring folk, blues, Caribbean, and Latin music traditions to the table as part of the discussions.
“Scholarly pursuit of jazz was missing in the 1950s, and this is why what was happening at the Music Inn to be so important,” says George Schuller, a musician and filmmaker, whose documentaries on the Inn will be shown at The Triplex event in August. Rothstein refers to Schuller as the top authority on the full history of the Music Inn. Schuller’s father, Gunther, was personally involved with The Lenox School of Jazz in 1959 and 1960.
“It was certainly the most authoritative attempt to have this kind of program at the time, talking about the origins of jazz,” says Schuller. Famously, the elder Schuller later rose to become an Artistic director of Tanglewood’s Berkshire Music Center and established the first accredited jazz studies program at a music conservatory.
Seeing the need for more space to support the roundtables and a proper audience and stage, The Music Barn was built on the grounds to be able to hold over 700 people. That was 1955. Stephanie Barber lured Louis Armstrong to come play a show where over 1,000 people showed up, a rogue sight and occurrence in sleepy 1950s Berkshires. It was a lofty upgrade from the few dozens that would hang around the Inn. Performances organically came together through informal roundtable discussions and fireside chats with music luminaries of the day who were in town to see if the Inn lived up to the hype.
With the barn designed to house an audience for performances, names like Charles Mingus, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughn would come to perform. At the end of the roundtables and summer of 1956, stride piano master Willie “The Lion” Smith put on a show, and on the sidelines was a 30-year-old Miles Davis, taking it all in. There is a legendary story of Miles playing for a few stragglers after that historic concert in August of 1956. (There are also rumors of Miles performing in the barn with his famous quintet around the time Kind of Blue was released, but that probably didn’t happen.) Orbiting those fireside performances were different roundtable discussions—informal ones that evolved into more academic and scholarly discussions, detailed and comprehensive. Drumming icon Max Roach was a regular and led lectures and performances, and the breed of excellence was attracting industry figures, journalists, and musicians, all eager to see what the buzz in the Berkshires was all about. The foundations were being laid for conceiving a formal school for studying jazz, something that didn’t yet exist at the time.
Inn School
"It is important for the reader to keep clear the distinction between The Lenox School of Jazz and the Music Inn in Lenox, The School of Jazz was one of the programs at the Music Inn, which was a resort that Philip and Stephanie Barber opened in 1950," writes Jeremy Yudkin, professor of music at Boston University and jazz and classical scholar. His book The Lenox School of Jazz: A Vital Chapter in the History of American Music and Race Relations is considered the seminal book on the school. (All proceeds from its sales support the Lenox Library.)
In 1957, The Lenox School of Jazz officially opened on the property. Stearns had informally minted the Institute of Jazz in 1952, essentially a lineup of jazz players. But thanks to the involvement and musical direction of John Lewis, a friend of the Barbers and the co-founder of the influential Modern Jazz Quartet, The Lenox School of Jazz began its formal run as a program at the Inn. Lewis already had been participating in the roundtables. He and the Barbers rallied beer sponsors to help create scholarships for students, which they recruited for the three-week summer sessions. The students were mingling with the impressive jazz faculty and luminaries who were strolling the campus, leading discussions, and performing. For the first time, students of jazz and music theory learned from masters of the form and could improve weaknesses in their own grasp of music. That year, Metronome magazine said of the school: “This is probably the most important step taken in jazz.”
“The Barbers getting John Lewis involved, with his gravitas and connections, was the key,” says Yudkin. “He got everybody to come and kept an extremely tight regimen of master classes and performances and lectures. It was a very serious curriculum.” Self-taught or newer jazz musicians learned to read music. Classical players came to learn how to swing, which made sense considering Schuller’s father, a School of Jazz instructor, coined the term “third stream” for music combining classical (stream one) and jazz (stream two) for a new form of playing (the third stream).
The school became one of the first places in the country to hire major marquee performers in jazz to instruct younger musicians on the form and formlessness of jazz itself. Ornette Coleman was among the students. In residence was the Dave Brubeck Quartet, one of the most successful small jazz groups working at the time.
The musicians found it to be a delightful anomaly. Instead of smoky jazz clubs and performance halls, the Music Inn was something new—rural and open and a place of knowledge sharing. Moreover, it was a gig. Says George Schuller: “The reason John Lewis could get all those legends to come every summer was because there was only one jazz festival paying musicians back then, the Newport Jazz Festival. So, players had time, and the need for work.”
The seriousness of the undertaking also yielded an atmosphere of collegiality and respect. A new experience, to be sure, particularly in small-town Lenox and Stockbridge, where local kids were learning at the feet of professional Black jazz performers. The roundtables helped players divorce from the notion that there needed to be a fence between the different styles of jazz, from bebop to swing to big bands and so on.
And its impact could be found in the years after the school ended in 1960. The educational jazz industry began to materialize and bloom. There were no accredited college programs yet for the study of jazz, but that began to change after the Lenox School of Jazz. “A third of the students went on to have big careers in jazz performance or jazz education afterward, like David Baker, a former student who became one of the premier music program educators at Indiana University,” Schuller notes.
By the end of the school’s run, the venue was sold to Don Soviero, co-owner of Bousquet in Pittsfield. Soviero began to develop the Music Inn for its next phase, adding the Northern Italian Supper Club at The Potting Shed, which was once a cocktail lounge that the Barbers opened in 1957. Soviero would co-produce performances at Pittsfield Boys Club’s new auditorium when acts like Ray Charles, Joan Baez, and the Simon Sisters (Carley and Lucy) would perform. Even a young Don McLean had some stage time. Soviero ran the Inn for six years until bankruptcy forced him to close in 1967; he later relocated to Italy, where he opened a successful culinary school and taught Hollywood celebrities to cook.
For the next few years, the Music Inn was occasionally used for one thing or another, but mostly it remained vacant. Ray Charles had explored purchasing the property and turning it into a drug rehabilitation clinic for musicians, but that never materialized. Then, in 1969, a local contractor hired to renovate Blantyre in Lenox heard that the Music Inn was for sale and rang his cousin, an architect in Philadelphia, to fill him in. Woodstock had just ignited a revolution in youth culture and popular music, and there was promise to the tract of land in that regard. Something novel could happen there. It was worth investigating, he told his cousin.
That cousin was David Rothstein.
Back Inn Business
“I drove up here in a blizzard and arrived at the Music Inn grounds in about three to four feet of snow,” Rothstein tells me while we flip through old photographs at our Race Brook Lodge meetup. He says he was immediately struck by the beauty of the place even in winter and marveled at the pine trees and original Olmsted landscape design of the grounds. Rothstein and partners/managers Robert and Olga Weiss made more changes, such as the addition of the Toad Hall Movie House. Live performances started taking shape. Rothstein eventually moved into the Potting Shed greenhouse building with his now ex-wife Nancy Fitzpatrick, progeny of the Red Lion Inn family ownership, who had attended Potting Shed shows in her teens, like Odetta and Sunny Terry & Brownie McGhee. The grounds of the Music Inn now had seating for over 5,000 people. Residents responded by going to the Stockbridge Selectboard with their concerns that the transformation into a haven for rockers would attract "hordes of hippies" and create "a new Woodstock.”
“Arlo Guthrie has said the Music Inn was the original social media, and it really became the last of the counterculture gathering places focused on music and young people,” Rothstein says. In 1970, a new era was dawning for the Music Inn and its evolution. Alice Brock (of Alice’s Restaurant fame) was living next door. “She would be driving around in her convertible Cadillac with hippies in the back seat,” recalls Rothstein. At the time, the hippie movement was well underway, and Woodstock cemented the image of young people. “They were scared of hippies back then,” says Rothstein. He was new to booking live music and needed help. Manny Greenhill lent him a hand, as he was the manager for Joan Baez and had produced or scheduled performances for folk royalty in the ’60s, including Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Mahalia Jackson. He largely created the folk scene in Cambridge on the other side of the state. Greenhill was the first to put Dylan and Baez together on stage and wanted a place for his artists to play in the summer. For the first couple summers under Rothstein, Baez was a fixture performer at the new Music Inn grounds.
To hear Rothstein tell it, this was the hippies vs. the establishment. Or, at the time, the Music Inn vs. Tanglewood. Arlo Guthrie and Seeger’s first concert of the Rothstein era of music at the Inn was on July 4, 1970—two decades from when Arlo’s father, Woody, performed next to Seeger under the Barbers. Besides the films being screened and curated by the Boston Film Society at the Toad Hall Moviehouse, there were also live theater performances. Under powerhouse producer Lyn Austin’s guidance, two or three years of major off-Broadway shows happened at the Inn. The group that assembled and performed later formed into the Music-Theatre Group of New York City.
Inn Memoriam
The fact that the Music Inn isn’t more celebrated in pop culture history or by the living artists and performers who played there remains somewhat shocking to a newcomer or fresh eyes—like writers who are transplants out here from Boston and lack the deep history locals know by proxy. Locals like Lee resident, town selectboard member, and musician of 50 years Bob Jones fondly recalls frequenting the Inn in his youth. He caught the first screenings of cannabis prohibitionist film classic Reefer Madness there and remembers the looseness of the live music energy. When he showed up to a concert with The Band, “the group was two hours late and there was a full crowd,” he says. “The roadies for the group loaded all the gear on a farm tractor and trailer and literally backed it down the hill through the middle of the crowd directly to the stage, threw their gear up there, and then Robbie Robertson and the group started right up.”
For that brief period of the school and the many performances at the Inn, its impact on music largely lives in obscurity, outside of the memories kept by those who are still around to tell tales from the Potting Shed days of the ’60s, and the even fewer people who can recall The Lenox School of Jazz days of the late-’50s.
“They dwindle in numbers, but there are still some people around here that remember going to those jazz shows,” says Yudkin. On the Music Inn archives, Arlo Guthrie is quoted saying the inn was "a great part of the cultural landscape for a long time, and the fact that it's not there anymore almost doesn't make a difference. Because now the wonderful thing that has happened is that Tanglewood has recognized the value of that very same music .... I think you shouldn't underestimate what that means.”
That recognition came through strife. Sound decibel issues, parking woes, impacts on local businesses from performances, and rowdy crowds became a chief complaint echoing through town meetings. The end result: The shows became Twilight Concerts so as to both not disrupt the sound sanctity of life in the Berkshires during the day, as well as not interfere with the classical music at Tanglewood at night.
As Rothstein booked more and more acts, from Toots and the Maytals, Tom Rush, Bonnie Raitt and John Prine, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and others, he ran afoul of Don Law, a respected promoter and club manager in Boston who was the keeper of flame of live rock performances. By the end of the 1970s and as a result of the friction with Law and Tanglewood, as well as the local complaints, Rothstein says acts began not returning his calls while going into the summer of 1979 season.
The music industry is no stranger to establishing strange bedfellows in order to solve problems. Rothstein says he attracted the attention of Frank Russo, a Providence, Rhode Island-based promoter and Law’s competitor. Rothstein traveled to meet Russo, and a deal was made. (“It felt like something out of The Godfather,” Rothstein recalls, laughing.) The two partnered up for that summer at the Inn. It was Russo’s connections that helped bring The Kinks in August of 1979 to play before an estimated 15,000 people. “I never even saw the show,” Rothstein says. “I was playing parking attendant from all the cars streaming in.”
A pull-out poster from the album release of that concert features the signature green- and-white-striped tent as the backdrop of the stage. That same tent once adorned the courtyard where the jazz luminaries of the 1950s played, right through to when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed for 5,000 fans in July of 1975.
(A few months after Springsteen was at the Music Inn, he was on the cover of both Newsweek and Time.)
It was Labor Day 1979. The final shows of the season were on the docket. The Allman Brothers were booked by Russo, and due to his mother’s funeral in New Jersey, Rothstein wasn’t able to be there. In attendance, though, was a youthful spirited crowd, and a private guard brought in by Russo made up of bikers. Altamont was fresh in the public consciousness, and some hippies rushed the gates to jump over and get in (a common thing of the day). As would be expected, fistfights ensued and a small dustup between some of the bikers and the concert goers went down. Word got around that a full-scale riot happened. “I would have let them all in the back door if I was there,” Rothstein says.
One of the fans at that Allman Brothers show was Stockbridge native and former Tanglewood student fellow Kenny Aronoff. In professional musician circles, Aronoff is industry drumming royalty. He’s been a part of over 60 Grammy®-nominated or awarded recordings and projects, played on stage or recorded with John Fogerty, B.B. King, Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Cash, Elton John, and many others. His life has been in bands, and that makes sense when considering he grew up with the Music Inn and Tanglewood in his backyard.
“I ended up being connected with both of them over the years,” Aronoff tells me by phone. “First, as a spectator, then as a student, and then as peers with the musicians that played there. In my mind, you can’t say one without the other. It’s sad the town made an issue about the noise at the Music Inn, but you could be in town and hear classical or a symphony warming up at Tanglewood and then soon after you would hear The Eagles or one of the acts at the Inn.”
His time studying at Tanglewood in the summers (under Gunther Schuller) may have melded rock and roll with classical training and music reading for him, but it was his carefree days catching shows through the ’70s at the Twilight Concert series, or catching a movie at the Toadhouse Movie Hall, that he remembers most fondly. The Music Inn brought a bit of Woodstock to the Berkshires, he says. If it wasn’t for the Music Inn demonstrating rock and roll could sell tickets—lots of tickets— Tanglewood may not have turned to popular music shows. The legacy of the Music Inn on a local boy turned rock star is never out of mind for Aranoff.
“I saw Ike and Tina Turner and carried their stuff to help out,” Aronoff says. “I saw Mahavishnu in 1972 there after my freshman year at UMass and didn’t know who they were, but would watch Billy Cobham on drums just smashing a huge gong and McLaughlin doing his modal guitar thing. I can’t even describe it. It was like watching an NFL running back play drums at lightning speed. I was, like, ‘Who are these guys and how did they end up here?’”
Not Fade Away
Once diving into the history and rich story that is the Music Inn, it’s not hard to walk onto the former grounds and feel a sense of nostalgia. Even if you never went to it. The Olmsted pine trees still tower over the old restaurant and Potting Shed space of performances. Condos now reside where the eclectic moviehouse, stage, and amphitheater area once was. On a tree is a plaque commemorating the 1970-1979 run of Twilight Concert series with a murderer’s row of acts etched into metal.
Still residing on the grounds in the former Potting Shed is Nancy Fitzpatrick. During my visit to her home, she is amiable and warmly recalls what she still can about the details of the day when discussing the Music Inn. She can recall music in The Potting Shed as a teenager, as well as her time at the Twilight Concerts of the 1970s. “I think of this thing that happened in a very contained place and situation that was pretty extraordinary and unlikely to ever happen anywhere ever again,” Fitzpatrick says. “I remember seeing Van Morrison before a performance here, tying a balloon to his daughter’s arm as they walked around the grounds. It was very sweet. And the Springsteen show was amazing.”
Walking the rising lawn and surveying the old grounds, I can see the condos under the old pines that define the landscape where the moviehouse and stage were in the distance. Nancy shows me the old Potting Shed and points out where the shows happened and nods to the original old stone foundations of the ancient greenhouses there. Memories and stone. Timber and the timbre of the past, forever connected and just out of reach of the present at the same time. Always at the risk of being swept into the dustbin of history without someone or something to remain and remind the future of the fact that it all actually happened, it mattered, and it is remembered.
However, as Rothstein famously says, almost as a guiding mantra of recalling the Music Inn in its afterlife: “If you were there, you don’t remember. And if you remember, you were never there.”
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