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Long before Alternative Country, Heartland, and Roots Rock became part of the contemporary musical vocabulary, Dave and Jon Gershen were experimenting with songwriting styles that would later be identified with those now popular genres. Rolling Stone once described their music as "..belonging to that growing C&W territory outside of the Nashville-Bakersfield axis where rural licks and urban musicianship are blending into a musical idiom of their own." Through the years, they’ve been content to let others try to categorize their music. The Gershens have always thrown out the music business “rulebook" that says you must define yourself by a single style to get your songs across. Their eclectic brew of country, blues, folk, rock and jazz has continued to win them critical acclaim and loyal fans the world over for more than thirty years.
As teenagers growing up near New York City in the early 60s, they couldn’t help but soak up all the music in and around Greenwich Village. It was not unusual in those days to see people like Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, and Charles Mingus all performing somewhere the same evening. It didn’t take long for Dave to find an audience at the many Folk Music coffee houses that were popping up all over the metropolitan area. Meanwhile, Jon had developed into a first rate electric guitarist with a taste for Jazz and Blues and by age 16 had put together his first group.
Several years later in 1968, the two brothers, by now veterans of various “cover bands", decided to team up with TONY BROWN, a gifted musician and songwriter who would later appear on BOB DYLAN’S “Blood On The Tracks" album. Their objective was to begin to concentrate more on doing their own music and hopefully land a record deal. Calling themselves’s “The Montgomeries" they displayed considerable originality in their approach to the blues and country style songs in their repertoire. Pretty soon, they tired of the manic pace in Manhattan and turned their attention to the small upstate New York town of Woodstock. They had heard through the musician’s grapevine that this was a place where you could get serious about writing and recording without a lot of distractions. So in 1969, they packed up and moved there. Although Bob Dylan was already associated with the place and The Band had recently put down roots, it was still pretty low key back then. There were several nice clubs, the rents were dirt cheap, and unlike the city, you could hear yourself think. The Montgomeries, like many that followed, made a home for themselves in the Catskill Mountains.
The Woodstock of the late 60s and early 70s was a magnet for a lot of musicians disenchanted with the music business machine that seemed only interested in grinding out commercial acts with little interest in substance. The growing community of musicians included people like Tim Hardin, Paul Butterfield, Roger Tillison, Happy & Artie Traum, Eric Kaz, Dave Sanborn, John Hall, Amos Garrett, Buzzy Feiten, Arlen Roth and many others. This was truly a “golden age" where a sense of shared purpose developed and musical collaborations came naturally. One of these newly arrived musicians soon became a close friend of the Gershen brothers. His name was Van Morrison. They met at an outdoor concert held every summer in an open field on the outskirts of town featuring all local talent.
Morrison and The Montgomeries each did a set and the next day Van told them how much he had enjoyed hearing their music. This was the start of a deep and enriching association. Jon and Dave spent many a day and night hanging out with the Irish troubadour trading stories about the music business. On numerous occasions, Van would sit in with The Montgomeries at their local club dates, and when he did, the audience was in for a rare treat indeed.
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