Monday, March 28, 2016

Bob Dylan played pool in Kingston, but where?



"Bob Dylan playing pool, Kingston, N.Y., 1964." reads the caption on a photo of by Daniel Kramer, who followed Dylan for a year starting in Woodstock.

I stumbled upon that factoid on a recent Google alert. I masochistically send myself alerts for all things Kingston N.Y., which mostly leads back to news items from local news sources, and also out of town obits and police items related to Kingston natives or people who live here, and the occasional gem like this.

As I'm wont to do, I took to the power of the crowd to find out where in Kingston this photo was taken. There was nobody to ask about this here on a very quiet Easter newsroom Sunday. It would have been easier to scream across the room, after all, but it was not to be this time. 


Over at the "I'm from Kingston" Facebook group. I was informed that this was on the second third  floor of the Clermont building, on top of what used to be Bop to Tottom, which is the red on the 360 image above. The first floor, will become a larger Duo Bistro. It was Uptown Billiards at 293 Wall Street in Kingston.




That's Mercury Rev's Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak  in that tweet..

Kramer shot the cover of Highway 61, among other things.


Among those other things shot by Kramer, is a photo of Bob Dylan playing chess in Woodstock. 
Time to yell at the cloud again.
Where in Woodstock was this photo taken?


Uptaded 3/29 at 11 a.m. Matt Cahill, in the comments, points out:

The pool hall was not on the second floor of the Clermont building,but the 3rd floor.The 2nd floor was Eng's chinese restaurant,and prior to that it was Shanghai Lou.The pool hall was woned by Nick Caslich and later by Bob East.
Managing Editor Tony Adamis reminded me that former staffer Jesse J. Smith (now with the Kingston Times) wrote about this a while back. I was able to track the story to the microfilm and the disk in the building, and I've reposted it online, because it was removed online at some point during a site migration.

I've also found the David McDonald's "Bob Dylan in Woodstock" segment from the 2006 documentary. "Woodstock Revisited," also embedded below.


Bob Dylan in Woodstock from David McDonald/Filmmaker on Vimeo.

The town supervisor adds: