“I recorded people I knew,” he recalls, reeling off a list of albums now considered classics. “After college I moved to the Village, an apartment on the corner of West 6th and West 12th and ended up having the folk singer Odetta live with us for almost a year. It became evident to everyone she was a fantastic talent and while she was there, the apartment became something of a salon for folk musicians…I managed her early career and produced her first three albums.”
Gitter speaks of his love for that scene and its deep sense of camaraderie, with everyone sharing songs and what success they found. But by autumn, 1957, he was headed to England to study at the London School of Musical and Dramatic Art, which he’d been planning since his college graduation a year earlier.
“I turned Odetta on to Al Grossman, who was in Chicago still but was soon to get into folk music in a big way,” he says. “I supported myself in London doing concerts, making eight or nine pounds a performance, playing with Ewan McColl and A.L. Lloyd — just enough to pay for my flat.”
While there, Gitter and some Fulbright scholar friends started sketching out plans to start a serious theater company back in the States. That theater, Repertory Boston, became a critical and audience success but “lost pots of money…” although some professors at the Harvard Business School asked if they could follow it all as a case study, then offered the young entrepreneur a full scholarship to the Harvard Business School.
What happened to his folk music during those years?
Gitter remembers a fateful concert put on by George Wein, who ran a fabled club called Storyville at the time, alongside the Newport Jazz Festival and soon-to-inaugurate Newport Folk Festival.
“I was asked how soon I could get to Cape Cod and replied that it would take about three hours,” he said of his last public gig in decades. “I got to the venue, which held about 2,000, and was told I was to fill in for The Kingston Trio who had broken up that morning. By the time I went on stage there were only 300 left in the house; I then emptied the hall.”
In the following years, Dean Gitter earned his MBA, joined another theater group alongside the likes of Stockard Channing and Tommy Lee Jones, started the Orson Welles Cinema, and went on to work with a number of innovative business ventures around the Boston area before moving to the Catskills in 1970 to manage an ashram in Big Indian, including its fabled restaurant Rudi’s.
The folk music became a personal thing, “basically the equivalent of singing in the shower.”
“I stayed in Big Indian 40 years because Rudi’s was just down the road,” Gitter says. “I had to do something; you’ve got to make a living. I made a career here.”
Enter all those other items, from television stations to the Emerson and Belleayre resort project.
As well as the current concert return, for which he will be accompanied by Buddenhagen.
Had he hooked back up with anyone from those old days?
“They’re all dead,” Gitter noted.
He added, a bit quieter, how he sometimes feels now like he wasted 50 years of his life not playing the folk music he feels so enriched by. He wonders whether he’s returned to who he really is.
And the Belleayre Resort that everyone still associates him with?
“We are within striking distance of finally getting all our permits; we have done everything required of us and are now in the hands of the DEC (the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation) to complete what they need to do,” he replied. “The local permits are being reviewed. I suspect it will all be completed within the next 90 to 100 days.”
Finally, Gitter addresses the Sunday concert, a $60 per person benefit for the Belleayre Music Festival which kicks off over the coming Memorial Day weekend.
“My mother developed a very interesting side career doing musical biographies of the great composers that she would illustrate while sitting at the piano,” he explained, excitedly. “I’m going to do roughly the same thing on the assumption that a lot of people haven’t heard the history of folk music.”
Or of this old folkie named Dean Gitter.
“Old Folkies Never Die,” a performance and record release event with Dean Gitter, takes place 3 p.m.-6 p.m. Sunday, April 27 at the Emerson Resort & Spa in Mount Tremper. Tickets are $60, including wine & hors d’oeuvres, and benefit the Belleayre Music Festival. Special guests expected. For reservations and information, call 877-688-2828.
