Westport does not lack for musical entertainment.
VersoFest turns the Library into a rockin’, rollin’ concert hall. Across the parking lot the Levitt Pavilion offers dozens of concerts, of all kinds, from spring to fall.
For a decade or so, the Levitt was the site of an annual Labor Day Blues, Views & BBQ Festival.
Before that though, Westport hosted another Blues Festival.
It ran for only 2 years: 1993 and ’94. But it some great local talent.
The Slo Leak band, for example, starred Charlie Karp (the guitar phenom who left Staples High School at 16 to play with Buddy Miles and a couple of years later, Jimi Hendrix); Harvey Brooks (the Westport bassist who played on Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” and the Doors’ “Touch Me,” and with Miles Davis and many others), and Danny Kortchmar (another Westport resident and session musician with Don Henley, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, David Crosby, Carole King, David Cassidy, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Steve Perry, Carly Simon and more).
The event was produced by Mark Naftalin, the Westporter inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for his keyboard work with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Eric von Schmidt — a musician muse for Bob Dylan, and a noted artist too — created the t-shirts and poster.
Naftalin’s wife Ellen helped him. She remembers the logo included Westport’s iconic Minute Man — but “with a guitar instead of a gun in his arms.”
She adds, “When Eric first drew it he had a tightly rolled joint in the Minute Man’s mouth. But I was worried that the powers that be in Westport would object, so I asked him to make it look more like a cigarette.
“Eric snipped off the rolled end. Now it looks more like a joint than it did in the first place.”
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