As if anyone ever needs to be told again that the Catskills and the mid-Hudson valley have played a role in popular music history that is vastly disproportionate to the region’s population but somehow in keeping with its fundamentally stoner, Van Winkle character. Even so, allow me to fire up the Hammond and the Leslie and preach once more! After correcting for some 1960’s revolutionary hyperbole–that generation’s stubborn refusal to ever go gentle and relinquish the reins of culture, cool, and curriculum–the story pretty much checks out. Thanks to great natural beauty, proximity to New York City, and a dash of something mysterious in “these blue hills,” we continue to enjoy (and reinvent, and trade on) a potent little myth of musical and historical significance. I mean, I’d be lost without it.
Modern myths are crowned and authenticated by one thing alone: celebrities, light-absorbing and light-radiating stars. Regarding that, we might quote Spencer Tracy from 1952’s Pat and Mike: “not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce.” While our celebrity cosmos is moderately well-spangled, our case for mattering rests squarely on an extended visit from a certain photogenic Minnesota folksinger and the legitimate multi-decade residency of a couple of talented Canadians and that lovely chap from Arkansas. As such, the Catskill musical mythos is, at its core and in its thriving lineage, revivalist and antiquarian. It consciously abdicates modernity. It celebrates not only the old tools and traditions of music making but pre-mass-media identities and narratives as well, mined from blues, folk, agrarianism, American communism, war, the Bible.
The great Catskills historian and eccentric prose stylist Alf Evers devoted chapter after chapter to the mythic presence of the Devil and his witches in the Catskills, much of it centered on the adventures of 19th century witch doctor Jacob Brink and his witch doctor son. The Devil of this place is a curious one, more a trickster and a frequently-unsuccessful dealmaker than a pure slash and burn guy. In fact, he often turns out to be sympathetic and likable in his bumbling. So, with that kind of devil in the house, we might expect a few folds of deceit, red herrings, and left turns in the musical myths of the Catskills.
It starts, of course, with the fact that Woodstock didn’t happen anywhere near Woodstock, a devil’s prevarication if ever there were one. It includes such anomalies as the great punk rock anthem of the 20th century—John Cage’s 4’33”—originating as a piece of Woodstock folk music. And it features the irony (he says, finally arriving at his point), that this mountaintop monastery of roots music, gut string, aged wood, and old style hats and coats was also one of the original sites of the revolution that nearly wiped the old ways off the face of the earth: the music video.
Located on the grounds of the Bearsville Theater, Utopia Soundstage was built by the Bearsville impresario Albert Grossman for the visionary musician and technologist Todd Rundgren. While more psychedelic-tinged Philly Soul than stylized yokel folk, Todd’s early output (like his undisputed classic Something/Anything) is hardly incompatible with the Catskill rock aesthetic. But the glistening, showy glam-soul of his band Utopia and much of his later solo work sounds pretty damn futurist and digital in the land of Big Pink. And note the year in which Todd’s state-of-the art music video production facility opened: 1980, more than a year before the August, 1981 launch of MTV. Todd is, if nothing else, a seer.
Utopia operated profitably for decades as both a video facility and a proper recording studio. Early in the new millennium the Album-Oriented Rock (AOR) radio pioneers known as WDST moved in, and the big room served as the site of countless live performance broadcasts by big names and local luminaries. The Utopia/WDST building was acquired part and parcel (and exquisitely renovated to the studs) by Lizzie Vann late in the 2010s, opening in early 2020 directly into the cavernous yap of Covid, from which it is still just emerging.
And the building once called Utopia had been more or less quiet and dark until the storied Hudson valley producer, live sound specialist, drummer, and entrepreneur Pete Caigan had an idea. Like most pro audio people, Caigan is used to a fair bit of bouncing around. He epitomizes the idea that the engineer IS the facility. Have ears, will travel. The New York City and Westchester native came to the area to attend Bard College in the ‘90s. In the very early 2000s, he founded his studio and production venture Flymax Sound in a cottage on his Woodstock property. He served as house engineer at Dreamland studios from 2008 and 2012 and ran Flymax out a number of local rooms in the interstices.
“Most recently,” Pete says, “I was at the IBM complex in Kingston. I had to move out of that space. There were new landlords coming in. I could have stayed for a very high cost but it seemed like a good time for a change. So I found a small room here at Utopia that Lizzie rented me when I had a mix I had to finish. I brought in some gear and I was sitting there in that room, kinda looking around because there was nothing going on in the building. So I was staring out at this beautiful room and all these spaces. Given my predilection for large spaces and beautiful recording studios, the conversation began, and it didn’t take long before we reached an agreement where I took over the main room at Utopia, three of the booths, and a couple of rooms upstairs for offices and a video podcast room.”
The studio market in the mid-Hudson valley is crowded and competitive. Like other local engineers, Caigan has worked out most of the area’s notable facilities at one time or another and has great affection for them all. But the uniqueness of Utopia is hardly lost on him. “I think the big difference is that we provide the video aspect. It’s a black box large room, so there’s no light if you don’t want there to be any light. For video directors that’s ideal, and very unusual around here. We have already had a number of video projects. Several companies have come in to shoot. We have the ability to host large groups of people. It’s no problem. If your video production is 20 people and you have trucks, we’re good. We have done some music videos and a lot of live performance videos. Vera Farmiga was in doing her most recent video. We did a recent live performance video from Shane Guerette out of Albany.
“There’s also a massive amount of power. There’s 100 amps, 3-phase power in the building. We have 250 20 to 50 circuits in the live room. That’s highly unusual for a recording studio. Lizzie Vann, the owner, did a tremendous job renovating the entire property, including Utopia. It was clean, fresh, painted. All the electricity and plumbing were perfect, and she also purchased some beautiful theater curtains from India that were hung in Utopia. So the actual room sounded incredible. It was designed originally by [world-famous studio architect and local resident] John Storyk, the same person who built Electric Ladyland. He also built Bearsville Studios.”
As producer, live sound provider, and musician who has based his career out of the Woodstock area, the mythic value of the facility is meaningful to Caigan. “Calling the new venture Utopia,” in favor of his own well-established Flymax brand, “was not exactly a no-brainer. There were a number of conversations about that. It seemed to serve the legacy of the space, the story of Todd moving in and working with Albert, and the birth of the music video. Utopia was an integral part of that. I wanted to honor that. I had worked at Utopia doing live broadcasts many times when Radio Woodstock was the tenant. I engineered live performances by Kate Pierson, Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams, Amy Helm, The Felice Brothers, Marco Benevento, all live broadcasts from the Utopia soundstage. I also wanted to incorporate the Bearsville name because of the legacy. This was one of the four Bearsville recording studio rooms when it was built for Todd in 1980. So calling it Utopia Studios Bearsville was a very thought-through process, to honor the legacy of the space and to move ahead.
“But really the attraction to me is how well it is built. You don’t see many places like this on the east coast that are still open. It was built as a proper recording studio. There’s two-foot thick concrete walls; there’s like a foot and a half-thick floating concrete slab. Thirty-foot cathedral ceilings. It’s really unusual. That’s the story to me—the John Storyk-buiding-it story. The sound is just brilliant. You go in there and play guitar or piano and everyone just turns to me and says this is the best room I’ve played in on the east coast. Plus, we have space for 80 chairs. We can do a full on symphony orchestra.”
Already, a number of well-known producers, local residents and otherwise, have flocked to the space. These include David Baron, John Alagia, Simone Felice, Jeremy Backofen, Caigan himself, and more. “The engineers and producers that work out of here are some of the best in the world,” Caigan says. Recent clients (and remember, this place is just getting off the ground) have included the likes of Amanda Palmer, Rachel Yamagata, The Felice Brothers, James Felice, Alexa Ray Joel (Billy’s daughter), and the talented newcomer Ginger Winn. On a number of these projects, Caigan’s drumming skill has been called into service. “I really didn’t expect that,” he says, “but it has been incredibly fun to play on these sessions.”
The re-launched Utopia can also be appreciated as just one piece in the vibrant rebirth of the entire Bearsville Theater campus. Brooklyn Bowl founder Peter Shapiro and his company Dayglo Presents have recently taken over the operations of the theater, and Caigan notes with palpable enthusiasm, “we have installed tie-lines between Utopia and the theater, which means we can record audio and video that is being performed at Bearsville on our world-class API AXS console. I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the word where an API console is tied to a high-level intimate theater like that. It’s a dream for anyone wanting to make a live record or concert video.” It’s a kind of a dream for local music fans and followers to look on as Woodstock travels back to the future.
For more information, visit utopiabearsville.com.
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