When Bob Dylan fans bought copies of Bringing it all back home in 1965, they were not just impressed with the electrified folk-rock of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. Some were also intrigued by the cape, where an elegant Dylan was seen accompanied by a mysterious brunette in a red jumpsuit, holding a cigarette and looking at the camera.
Although few knew it at the time, the woman in the iconic photo was Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan’s then manager, Albert Grossman. A formidable figure in his own right – both on the music scene in the 1960s and in the Woodstock music community in the decades that followed – Grossman died on March 10 at the age of 81. His niece Anna Buehler confirmed the death to Rolling Stone, adding that Grossman died in his sleep at his home in Woodstock.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Albert Grossman became one of rock’s most imposing managers – the scary teddy bear of a man who led the careers of Dylan, Janis Joplin, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Band, Gordon Lightfoot and many others. “Albert was a good manager,” said Sally Grossman LOL in 2014. “He said, ‘Artists need managers. They cannot do this on their own. You cannot negotiate for yourself ‘”. According to Sally, it was she who also introduced Dylan to his future first wife, Sara Lownds, one of her friends.
“Albert wanted to get the best deal for his artists,” says Barry Buehler, Sally Grossman’s brother. “He always felt that they had not received what was due to them and worked hard to ensure that they were well rewarded. And Sally was a sounding board for many of her ideas. “
Born Sally Buehler in Manhattan in 1939, Grossman grew up in Queens, New York, attended Adelphi and Hunter Colleges and, like many of his generation, was attracted to the burgeoning Greenwich Village music community in the early sixties. Leaving college, initially for an office job at TWA (Trans World Airlines), she became a waitress, first at Café Wha! and then the Bitter End. There, Grossman saw many of the leading figures on the scene and met Albert Grossman, who had moved from Chicago to New York, where he ran the Gate of Horn club. “At that time, Albert never said hello to me,” she said in 1987. “He was very determined, very busy.”
Albert Grossman, 13 years older than she, was really immersed in his work. The two were married in 1964, and his wife took a front-row seat to this world when the two became one of the powerful couples in the rock and folk communities. “The years between 64 and 70 were a total blur,” recalled Grossman in 1987. “Our life was incredibly intense. Every night, about 30 of us met at Albert’s office on 55th Street to go out. The office was constantly crowded with people – Peter, Paul and Mary, of course, but also Ian and Sylvia, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, other musicians, artists, poets. “
Around 1963, Grossman bought a house in Woodstock. Dylan started visiting him before moving to the city, followed shortly after by the band, who took up residence in the house known as Big Pink. Talking to LOL in 2014, Sally playfully told the story of the band’s first ill-fated test to her husband. “Albert was invited to Big Pink to listen, so he could hire them for management,” she said.
“We went over there and Levon and Rick had girlfriends, and they said to the girls, ‘Albert is coming and making a cake.’ So, they make a cake and say to us, ‘Here, eat a piece.’ The band starts playing and Albert whispers to me: ‘We have to go home now’, and we are leaving. They thought Albert hated music, but the truth was that the girls had run out of cake flour and added buckwheat pancake flour to the mix, and Albert was highly allergic to buckwheat. He was turning red. They were so devastated. They built this thing and they were playing their music and Albert is leaving. It was kind of a joke with the guys for years. “
Sally Grossman in 1996, filmed in the same location with the same cover as the cover of ‘Bringing It All Back Home’
Deborah Feingold / Corbis via Getty Images
Albert Grossman was extremely protective of his clients and Sally had similar inclinations. As she told author David Hajdu in her book Positively 4º Street, that sense of discretion also influenced Dylan’s low-key relationship with Lowdns (who first saw Dylan on TV while visiting Grossman). “He didn’t like people to intrude on his family and the things that were really closest to him,” she told Hajdu. “If he was really serious about her, she had to be unknown. That was one of our [the Grossmans’] jobs, to help give you that privacy. “
Sally Grossman, who had an imposing presence just like her husband’s, had similar feelings about strangers. “I am very careful with journalists,” she said LOL in 2014 during an interview about the launch of the complete Basement Tapes collection. Asked about the mysterious motorcycle accident that derailed Dylan just before the recordings were made, she said: course Rolling Stone going to ask about it. And of course I refuse. “
Albert Grossman died in 1986 of a heart attack on a flight to Europe. At that time, he was practically out of the management business (he and Dylan had ended their professional relationship in the late 1960s), but he also opened a studio, Bearsville (where REM, Meat Loaf, Metallica Jeff Buckley and many others recorded) as two restaurants. After her death, Sally continued to supervise the studio, her record label (Bearsville Records) and completed her dream project – turning her storage shed into a theater. As she said, she had no choice: the zoning laws in Woodstock were about to change, making it impossible to open a venue in the future, so she was forced to take over the project sooner than she thought. The Bearsville Theater opened in 1989; Grossman sold it in 2004.
Along the way, Grossman developed a reputation as an imposing executive – and one who also avoided the media spotlight. In the past few years, she had retired from the music business, but was working on some kind of documentary about her late husband.
From your appearance in Bringing it all back homeGrossman was “amused”, says his brother. In a 1996 interview, she said, “I was around and Bob just asked me to do this.” About the red jumpsuit, she added: “I don’t think I wore it again.”
Lizzie Vann, the current owner of the Bearsville Theater, first met Grossman in 2019, when she bought the venue from later owners. Vann was well aware of Grossman’s appearance on Dylan’s cover, but says that Grossman was not even remotely interested in discussing the matter. “I would try to talk to her about things like that and say that she did an incredible job with the theater and running the studio,” says Vann. “And she would be disdainful and say, ‘It’s not about me – it’s about Albert.’ But she lived across the stream and could see the theater and say, ‘I see what you are doing! I need you to paint this and that! ‘”