Folk scene friend of Bob Dylan was at the heart of an enduring rock mystery
On the morning of July 29, 1966, Bob Dylan and his wife Sara had coffee with Sally Grossman at her elegant home in Woodstock, in upstate New York. When they left, Dylan decided to make the short trip to their own home at nearby Byrdcliffe on an old motorcycle, borrowed from the Grossmans’ garage. His wife followed him in a car.
As they pulled out of the drive, Grossman was talking on the phone to her husband Albert, who was Dylan’s manager and was in his office in Manhattan. She was still talking to him a few minutes later when Sara’s car reappeared. Dylan staggered out of the vehicle and, as Sally later recalled,
‘‘lay down on the porch, kind of moaning and groaning’’.
It seemed that
Dylan had come off the motorcycle, which had then fallen on top of him. It made Grossman the primary witness in what became one of rock’s most potent mysteries.
Dylan was at the height of his whirlwind fame. He had just finished a defiant world tour with an electric backing band, which had provoked jeers and a famous heckle of ‘‘Judas!’’ from fans of his former acoustic folk style. But he was strung out on drugs and, after the accident, he disappeared. It was reported, and not denied by his management, that he had been rendered unconscious, broken his neck and was almost killed.
He spent the next 18 months kicking back in Woodstock, hanging out with the Grossmans and indulging in some laid-back sessions with The Band at their Big Pink home up the road. The sessions were released many years later as The Basement Tapes, after the recordings had been entrusted to Sally’s care by The Band’s Garth Hudson.
When Dylan re-emerged with the album John Wesley Harding at the end of 1967, it was a different-looking and sounding Dylan, and fans took to dividing his career into ‘‘precrash’’ and ‘‘post-crash’’.
Sally Grossman, who has died aged 81, did not speak publicly about what had happened until 2001, when she broke her silence to Dylan’s biographer Howard Sounes. Her account appeared to confirm the view expressed by conspiracy theorists that, if the crash had happened at all, it had been of a minor nature and that Dylan had used it as a ruse to get out of another debilitating tour and undergo rehab. Despite Dylan’s moaning and groaning, according to Grossman, he had no cuts or obvious external injuries. Neither, she told Sounes, was an ambulance summoned or the police called to the scene of the accident.
His cover blown, Dylan briefly mentioned in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Vol 1 that he had been in a motorcycle accident but admitted, ‘‘Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.’’
It was far from Sally’s only significant intervention in Dylan’s early life. In 1964 she
introduced him to her friend Sara Lownds, their first date taking place at the Grossmans’ wedding. Dylan married Sara in November 1965 but, earlier that year, when a mysterious ‘‘lady in red’’ appeared on the cover of his seminal Bringing It All Back Home album, the model was not Sara but Sally.
It became one of the most celebrated album covers in the rock pantheon, and prints sell for about £1000. As for the red dress, Sally never wore it again.
She was born Sally Buehler in 1939 and studied English literature at New York’s Hunter College. As the Greenwich Village folk music boom took off, she dropped out and became a waitress at Dylan’s early haunts in
Bleecker St. Another regular was Albert Grossman. By 1964 she had become his wife and they moved to Bearsville, an exclusive hamlet near Woodstock.
As Albert’s stable of folk artists expanded to include Janis Joplin and The Band, Sally described the rest of the Sixties as a ‘‘five-year blur’’. However, by 1970 Albert had fallen out with Dylan, and Joplin was dead. He ran a record company and recording studio in Bearsville and ended up owning much of the town. He died of a heart attack in 1986.
Although various elements of his empire were sold, Sally ran what remained until the end, and will forever be cast as Dylan’s enigmatic ‘‘lady in red’’. –