Big Pink

Big Pink — the pink-painted house at 2188 Stoll Road in West Saugerties, New York — was rented by members of the Band in 1967 and became the location where they and Bob Dylan recorded the sessions that would be known as the Basement Tapes. Dylan had retreated to Woodstock following his motorcycle accident in July 1966, and through the summer and autumn of 1967 he and the Band gathered in the basement of Big Pink to record informally — working through original compositions, folk songs, country numbers, and improvised pieces in a spirit of deliberate casualness that was the opposite of the studio recordings that had made Dylan famous. The recordings circulated as bootlegs for years before official release.

The Basement Tapes represent one of the most influential bodies of unreleased music in rock history. The songs — 'The Mighty Quinn,' 'This Wheel's on Fire,' 'I Shall Be Released,' 'Tears of Rage,' 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere' — were covered by other artists and became well-known before they were officially released, and the informal, lo-fi quality of the recordings influenced an entire approach to record-making that rejected studio polish in favour of immediacy and atmosphere. The Band's debut album, 'Music from Big Pink' (1968), took its name from the house and represented a conscious turn away from psychedelic rock toward something older, rootsier, and more Americana in character that influenced artists from Eric Clapton to Van Morrison.

Big Pink is a private residence and is not open to visitors. The house's distinctive pink colour and its documented history make it recognisable to those who seek it out on Stoll Road in the wooded hills above Saugerties. The Woodstock area — Saugerties, Woodstock proper, Bearsville — was a significant creative community in the late 1960s and early 1970s, home to Dylan, the Band, Van Morrison, and numerous other artists who valued its distance from New York City and its informal creative atmosphere.