IMMORTALIZED ON A BOB DYLAN ALBUM COVER
One of Bob Dylan’s most important early albums, “Bringing It All Back Home” from 1965, has the kind of cover that can strain eyes and fuel speculation. It is a photograph of Dylan, in a black jacket, sitting in a room full of bric-a-brac that may or may not mean something, staring into the camera as a woman in a red outfit lounges in the background.
“Fans became so fixated on deciphering it,” the music journalist Neil McCormick wrote in The Daily Telegraph of London last year, “that a rumor took hold that the woman was Dylan in drag, representing the feminine side of his psyche.”
She wasn’t. She was Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan’s manager at the time, Albert Grossman.
“The photo was shot in Albert Grossman’s house,” the man who took it, Daniel Kramer, told The Guardian in 2016. “The room was the original kitchen of this house that’s a couple hundred years old.”
“Bob contributed to the picture the magazines he was reading and albums he was listening to,” Kramer added, a reference to the bric-a-brac. “Bob wanted Sally to be in the photo because, well, look at her! She chose the red outfit.”
Grossman died March 12 at her home in the Bearsville section of Woodstock, N.Y.,
not far from the house where the photograph was taken. She had long been a fixture in Woodstock, operating a recording studio, a theater and other businesses there after her husband died of a heart attack at 59 in 1986. She was 81.
Her niece, Anna Buehler, confirmed her death and said the cause had not been determined.
Sally Ann Buehler was born on Aug. 22, 1939, in Manhattan to Coleman and Ann (Kauth) Buehler. Her mother was executive director of the Boys Club (now the Variety Boys and Girls Club) of Queens; her father was an actuary.
Grossman studied at Adelphi University on Long Island and Hunter College in Manhattan, but she was more drawn to the arts scene in Greenwich Village.
“I figured that what was happening on the street was a lot more interesting than studying 17th-century English literature,” she told Musician magazine in 1987.
Along the way she met Grossman, who was making his name managing folk music acts that played at those types of venues, including Peter, Paul and Mary, whom he helped bring together.
The couple, who married in 1964, settled in Woodstock, where Albert Grossman had acquired properties and which Dylan had also discovered about the same time, settling there with his family as well.