Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock - Tapa dura

Hoskyns offers a pitch-perfect East Coast corollary to his classic tome on the Laurel Canyon scene, Hotel California. (Jim Farber, MOJO)

[A]fascinating account of the epic influence and mysterious magnetism of this Dibley-sized corner of the Catskill mountains ... Hoskyns appears to have talked to everyone who ever lived here, and amasses their testimony with admirable grace and ease...[an] enthralling but melancholy tale. (James Lasdun, Guardian)

Hoskyns paints a brilliant portrait of the colourful characters that turned this little patch of woods in upstate New York into a hotbed for much of the music that changed America ... stunning. (Publisher's Weekly, starred review)

Hoskyns' love for the area, and the music it inspired ... shines throughout and drives this supremely evocative book, which also manages to set Woodstock's decline as a mirror to the changes riddling the outside world. Barney Hoskyns has painted his masterpiece. (Kris Needs, Record Collector)

Engrossing, enlightening... an important addition to a fuller understanding of how American music was shaped in the late sixties/early seventies and an impeccable guide to much of what was truly great about it. (Andy Childs, Caught by the River)

Hoskyns scrapes away the myths to reveal the harder truths: of magnificent music created amid hard drugs, bent business deals, gossip, claustrophobia and bed-hopping. (Graeme Thomson, Mail on Sunday)

A decade after chronicling the LA music scene in Hotel California, Barney Hoskyns turns a wonderfully attentive eye to an equivalent late '60s East Coast music community... Woodstock's heyday is fondly and colourfully remembered. (Allan Jones, Uncut)

Incidental stories are legion. The roster of sometime Woodstockers is extraordinary. Hoskyns is ... brilliant at two-word summations of the gist of a song. (Tim Dee, Observer)

In this engaging book, the veteran rock writer Barney Hoskyns delves deep below the surface of the town he calls 'a staging post between Greenwich Village and the Great American Wilderness' to unveil a place that could be paradise or prison, depending on your state of mind. (Lisa Verrico, Sunday Times)

Powerfully evokes the feelings and vibes - both good and bad - of living in and through those halcyon and fraught days. Hoskyns' illuminating book shovels through that crazy shit to discover the gold that lies beneath it. (Harry Carrigan, No Depression)

Think 'Woodstock' and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But Woodstock itself was over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. So why the misnomer? Quite simply, Woodstock was already a key location in the Sixties rock landscape, the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan had holed up after his 1966 motorcycle accident. In Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns recreates Woodstock's community of brilliant dysfunctional musicians, opportunistic hippie capitalists and scheming dealers drawn to the area by Dylan and his sidekicks The Band. Central to the book's narrative is the broodingly powerful presence of Albert Grossman, manager of Dylan, The Band, Janis Joplin and Todd Rundgren - and Big Daddy of a personal fiefdom in Bearsville that encompassed studios, restaurants and his own record label. Intertwined in the story are the Woodstock experiences of artists as diverse as Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Paul Butterfield, Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton and Bobby Charles. Drawing on first-hand interviews with the remaining key players in the scene, and on the period when he lived there himself in the 1990s, Hoskyns has produced an East Coast companion to his bestselling L.A. Canyon classic Hotel California - a richly absorbing study of a vital music scene in a revolutionary time and place.