YOU CAN LIVE WHERE FOGHAT SANG
Sharon, Vermont (#3) $349,000
Every once in a while, you come across a property that makes you reflect on your own mortality, on the fleetingness of life. Usually the properties are old or historic; some inhabitant's mark made long ago remains for you to see long after he or she has passed away. You wonder what it was like when the mark was made, and you realize decades or even centuries have elapsed since then—and the marks that others made in between are vanished or forgotten. "If only these walls could talk," you think to yourself . . .
"Or maybe if they could sing," we found ourselves thinking, deep in the woods of Sharon where a one-time recording studio had flamed briefly through the '70s and then gone out. Virtually nothing of the building's original purpose remained. Gone were the wild-colored graphics on the walls of the control room (and the equipment that was designed by the firm that decoded the Watergate tapes). Gone, too, were the pictures of the West-Coast-cult guru that Nick Jameson would stare at for hours and the videos he'd watch religiously at night while the rest of his band went back to the condos in Quechee. And where was the Fiat that Foghat smashed into the bulldozer at the bottom of the hill to record a crashing sound for the cut "Drive Me Home?" Where was Arlo Guthrie's new pink Cadillac that he flaunted so proudly when he first got it? Will anyone remember what the "isolation room" looked like when Willie Alexander used it to get pumped up for his singing, back when he recorded here with Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band? (Or the noose he'd wear around his neck, or the dead lizard he'd tape to the mike for inspiration?) Or how about The Cars? Or The Kingston Trio? Not to mention Dartmouth's own Glee Club, Aires or Barbary Coast?
It's taken just a few years for the chords that once rocked this place to fade away. People walking through now will see only a couple of modern, efficient houses and all the character those white walls and plush carpets contain. They will see convenience and comfort and square corners, a pleasant wooded view, a pond if the season is right. And when the bedroom stereo sends out pulses of "Doctor, Doctor, give me the news/I got a bad case of loving you . . ." they will think of Moon Martin, perhaps, but have no idea that he recorded those words here. And they'll never imagine what his producers had to go through to get him into what he called his "proper astral plane" before he'd sing.
Contact R. Walden, Inc. in Norwich, (802) 649-2210.
Lo, an unsung rock-and-roll shrine.
