They've been a footnote in rock trivia books (if indeed you can find them mentioned at all) for nearly thirty years. They recorded three albums for the Reprise label during their four year career, but none has ever been reissued on CD. They were the first band to take the stage on the first day of Woodstock, 1969. They broke ground as one of the earliest inter-racial rock groups. Their legendary live performances are still remembered, at least by those who can remember much of anything about the turbulent late-Sixties; in the era when the norm was three guitars, a bass and drums, they sported classical instruments on which they played blistering rock solos. They toured the country, played every major pop festival, and headlined at the Whiskey Au Go Go, both Fillmores and the Avalon; and they did it all without even the shadow of a hit record. They opened for all the era's rock stars, likely and unlikely; Jimi Hendrix, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Butterfield, Cream, the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, The Who, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, Santana, The Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, Jerry Lee Lewis, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Bing Crosby, James Brown, and Chuck Berry were among those they worked the road with. Then, when they were at their peak and things were about to break wide open, their career derailed on a rainy night in December 1969 when their lead singer, who had just turned twenty, was hit from behind on a Los Angeles freeway by a drunken driver. The accident left her with severe brain trauma and with her vocal cords destroyed by massive scar tissue; she was in a coma for weeks, intensive care for months, and physical therapy for years thereafter, and the group never really recovered from the tragedy.

The Los Angeles-based band Sweetwater began as a loose-knit aggregate of friends who gathered to jam on a regular basis on the flourishing coffeehouse scene of the middle 1960s. By late 1967 it had coalesced into seven full-time members; Fred Herrera, bass and vocals; Alex Del Zoppo, keyboards, harmonica and vocals; Nancy (then spelled Nansi) Nevins, lead singer and occasional acoustic guitar; August Burns, cello; Albert Moore, flute and vocals; Elpedio "Pete" Cobian, congas and percussion; and Alan Malarowitz, drums. Other members came and went; their friend, advisor, unpaid sound tech and sometimes road manager, Harvey Gerst, also played lead guitar at several gigs, and although no one can remember whether he ever recorded with them, he does appear in some of their Reprise publicity stills. They had a cellist named Wesley for a short time, a Seventh Day Adventist who couldn't come to any gigs that were held on Saturday nights; and another guitarist who doubled on bongos, R.J. "Rick" Carlyle, was with them for a short time in the early days. But these seven were the core, the creative force, the permanent recording and touring unit. Twenty-eight years later three are dead, one is missing, and the three surviving founding members still live in L.A., still work within the music industry at different levels, and still remember the dreams, excitement, career highlights, tragedy and eventual disillusionment of their brief heyday in the music business. Fred Herrera, Alex Del Zoppo and Nancy Nevins remember it all very well indeed.

Fred Herrera was born in Los Angeles on March 19, 1944. His father, Armando Herrera, himself a professional musician, was on the board of directors of the local Musicians' Union, and was the pianist in Desi Arnaz' band on the "I Love Lucy" show for fifteen years. The younger Herrera learned clarinet in grammar school and woodwinds in high school before turning to bass guitar in his teens to play in rock and roll bands with friends. He met fellow Sweetwater founder Alex Del Zoppo when both were in high school, and the two played in a number of the then-popular surf groups that proliferated on the Southern California scene in the wake of Dick Dale, the Surfaris, and the Beach Boys. Herrera had studied music and composition at Cal State L.A., and was in the early stages of a career as a music teacher when Sweetwater took off.

Alex Del Zoppo was born in Los Angeles on November 11, 1944. His parents were not musical; his father owned an appliance repair shop and his mother was a homemaker. He grew up listening to black gospel and R&B radio stations (but only when his parents were out of the house!), which became strong influences on his later musical development. He started playing piano at age twelve, then attended Marshall High School and Los Angeles City College, where he studied art and music. He formed a couple of cover bands while he was in high school, playing mostly rock and roll and surf music at dances and fraternity parties, sometimes with Herrera. He got his Army induction notice in 1965, and to avoid immediate active duty he decided to join the Air Force Reserves instead; the country was in the shadow of the Viet Nam war, and from then on Del Zoppo was constantly on edge, waiting to hear if he would be called up to be sent overseas. He did his basic training at Lackland AFB in Texas, and then was transferred to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS. During the Biloxi stint he went down to New Orleans every weekend, soaking up R&B from artists like Clarence "Frogman" Henry. Then he returned to L.A., and was playing on the coffeehouse scene when Sweetwater was born.

Nancy (stage name Nansi) Nevins was born in Glendale, California. Her father, who died when she was only eighteen months old, was an amateur musician who played the violin by ear, and an older sister is a singer and pianist. Music was part of her life from the very beginning; she attended Catholic grammar schools in the Glendale area, learned to play classical piano, and graduated from Glendale High School, where she continued her lifelong study of music. She listened to rock and roll radio constantly, and never wanted to be anything but a singer when she grew up. A self-described "juvenile delinquent," she smoked cigarettes in the girls' bathroom, ditched school occasionally, and pilfered things from department stores. She discovered older boys and fraternity parties, and got poor grades in everything in high school except her music classes, where she excelled. With a close friend named Diane Mellon, who was a guitar player, she used to go to the Ash Grove in Hollywood to hear artists like Bonnie Raitt and the Chambers Brothers. "We were two white truant fifteen-year-olds, gadding about in the car through Hollywood, and it was amazingly different in those days. It was SAFE. And I never had any other dreams but that; all I ever wanted to do with my life was just to sing, to hang around with cool people and be part of that life. I never ran around with anybody who was normal, I never went to a prom or did normal things or had normal goals. I LOVED that whole Sixties coffeehouse scene. People were gathered in corners, talking about Sartre, Kierkegaard and of course the war in Viet Nam. But mostly I just wanted to be there because of the music." Starting in 1964, Nevins and Mellon did a loose-knit duo act at a couple of the local coffeehouses on hoot nights, and sang together at school functions, but Nevins was always dreaming of a professional singing career.

Cello player August Burns was a classical music student at UCLA, with aspirations to become a conductor, when Herrera and Del Zoppo first met him. Herrera says: "I'll never forget the day we went to meet him for the first time. He was living in a little place in Venice, and when we got to UCLA to meet him, he was reading the Peking Review! You know, this won me over right away. A real straight, almost square intellectual type of guy, and at first we thought his perspective was a little bit snobby, but soon we realized that he was doing everything tongue in cheek. A very interesting fellow."

Flute player Albert Moore was born in Pittsburgh in 1940. After high school he joined the Air Force, and studied flute while he was stationed in Morocco. When he left the service he moved to Berkeley and from there to L.A., where he continued his music studies at Los Angeles City College and joined the floating group scene that moved from one coffeehouse to another. "He was a very high-energy person," Nevins remembers, "with a lot of dynamic personality onstage. He was wonderful to perform with when we were singing on mike together, because he put all his energy into it, and it was always fun to be creative with him." As a member of Sweetwater he became friends with singer Janis Joplin, as Del Zoppo remembers, because they liked to drink together when their groups were sharing a bill.

Conga player Elpedio Cobian was born in 1936. A political refugee from Cuba, he was working in the gas station where Albert Moore bought gas. Among his hobbies was scuba diving, and he had been a professional welder in Cuba. He kept a set of congas in the back room of the gas station, so that he could practice between customers, and Moore invited him to meet the others when they were putting the band together.

Drummer Alan Malarowitz was the youngest member of the group; born in 1950, he was only seventeen when Sweetwater was formed. He was from North Hollywood, CA and attended North Hollywood High School. He met Albert Moore, who was working part-time for Malarowitz' father, and the two played together at some of the local jam sessions, and later sat in with different members of what eventually became Sweetwater.

In the summer of 1967, when flower power was in full bloom, there was a thriving coffeehouse scene in L.A. One of these places, called The Scarab, was located near Los Angeles City College, and it was there that Del Zoppo met Moore. What would now be called an open mike, but was then called a hoot, took place there almost nightly, where anyone who wanted to could get up on stage and jam, and no one got paid. There would be anywhere from four to fourteen people playing at any one time, usually vamping on simple, basic rock and roll or blues chord changes. In this informal instrumental jam atmosphere, the nucleus of Sweetwater was born. Del Zoppo was sitting in there on a regular basis with Moore, Herrera, and Cobian, and one night Nevins was in the audience with a boyfriend. Del Zoppo remembers: "There was only one microphone set up there, for announcements or whatever, and one night we were all jamming away on a sort of one-chord change when Nancy got up on stage and started to sing "Motherless Child," a very old folk-blues type of song which we were playing in almost a Latin jazz style, and her singing really worked! So we said, hey, you want to get together? And basically that was it." Nevins says, "I walked into this room, and these amazing musicians were jamming there, and they looked like a mini United Nations, or the original Rainbow Coalition, and I fell in love with them instantly. They played everything, and it was weird and wonderful and they were jamming rock and roll! And I got with it right away, I just grabbed that harmonic vibe and started to sing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and they let me join them. And we must have jammed on that for half and hour, and then I just walked out. They were called Jay Walker and the Pedestrians at that time; I think it was Alex and Albert and Pete, and I'm not sure if Fred was there. But that was it, for me." They lost touch with each other for a short time, but eventually they all got together, added the other members from the floating jam session, and Sweetwater was in business.

They started rehearsing in Del Zoppo's parents' living room, which was so small that Nevins remembers having to sing in the kitchen; at the suggestion of a friend, Harvey Gerst, they soon graduated to live performances at the Love-Ins that were being held in Griffith Park and Elysian Park under the aegis of Elliott Mintz, John Carpenter and the legendary underground newspaper called the Los Angeles Free Press. Even in those free-wheeling days, this group was something different, to look at as well as to hear. A striking physical mixture, they fielded an unusually tall (5'9") white woman lead singer who wore long flowing dresses; an even taller black flute player who usually wore a broad-brimmed Amish hat and a formal coat with tails; a Cuban conga player; a white Jewish drummer; an Italian keyboardist; a black cellist who wore a barrister's robe; and a Mexican bass player. They dressed in Edwardian-style elegance, in outfits designed by Del Zoppo's sister Annette. The resulting original musical brew, formed around their self-penned songs, was a blend of jazz, folk, rock, blues, country and Latin influences, leading the executives at Reprise to tear their hair out later, when it came time to fit them into a comfortable marketing pigeonhole and they just wouldn't pigeon. Del Zoppo says, "In retrospect, it was a noble experiment, musically, but it was a fight all the way, because everything we did was so odd that it was impossible to categorize us. But on the other hand, we really would kick butt when we played live, so that made the record companies sit up and take notice." "Everyone else had three guitars and a drummer," says Nevins, "but we were different, and we loved the way we sounded. It was fresh and different, with the sounds from Alex's keyboard and the flute and my voice."

One of their close friends, though not an official member of the group, was Gerst, a sound technician with the Acoustic Control Amplifier company. A friend of Nevins', he was a veteran of the folk music wars who had been in an acoustic group called The Men, which later became The Association; a folk quartet called the Villagers, who split an album with The Womenfolk on RCA Victor called Hootenanny Live At the Ice House; and he had also worked with an early incarnation of The Byrds called The Beefeaters. A casual songwriter and excellent guitarist, he was an essential advisor to the members of Sweetwater in their formative days, offering many helpful suggestions about lighting, sound systems, clothing, mike technique, and various how-tos in battling their way through the music business. He and Jim (later Roger) McGuinn co-wrote a song for The Byrds, "Please Let Me Love You (And It Won't Be Wrong)," which appeared on the Turn Turn Turn album; Sweetwater rehearsed the song and once or twice performed it live, and it was slated to appear on their second album but never did. Gerst often went on the road with the group, playing occasional lead guitar and helping with the sound system. "He was a major asset," say Nevins. "He helped us in so many ways, being a little bit older and more experienced than we were, and he loved our music and was very supportive. He was a real good morale guy, and when he was around I didn't feel that things were so insane. He was very reassuring."

Their first "real" (i.e. paying) job after the Love-Ins was the landmark 1967 Artists and Models Ball, which was held yearly on Halloween in L.A. The Ball's producer, Gary Berwin, was a well-known figure on the Sunset Strip scene, and with his partner Bruce Glatman he became Sweetwater's manager. A few days after the Ball, the band started the first of several full week stints at the Whisky A Go Go, headlining over Steppenwolf for the four weekdays and opening for Big Brother And The Holding Company on the weekend; before they could turn around they were, at least locally, famous. A couple of the members held on to their days jobs at first (Moore was at different times a policeman and a postman, Cobian worked in the gas station, and Burns was a full-time student of ancient languages at UCLA), but soon everyone decided to make the band a priority. Within an amazingly short time they were signed to Reprise; every record company exec in town, evidently, had been at that early Whisky gig to see Big Brother, who were then in their own formative days and looking for a major label deal. So there was quite a spirited little bidding war for Sweetwater's services (Herrera recalls that a total of eleven different record companies sent representatives to meet with Glatman and Berwin), and Mo Ostin at Warner Brothers won the coin toss, signing the group in late 1967 or early 1968 to the Reprise label. Shortly thereafter Gary Berwin and Bruce Glatman dissolved their partnership, and Glatman took over sole management of the band, under the company name Shady Management.

Marshall Leib was a member of the Hollywood Argyles of "Alley Oop" fame who later became a freelance record producer; among his credits was We Five's hit single "You Were On My Mind." He was originally scheduled to be Sweetwater's producer, but Reprise assigned recording engineer Dave Hassinger, who had some pretty impressive rock and roll credentials of his own, to take over, and he produced their first album. Reprise allowed most of their artists incredible freedom in the studio in those days, but in the fledgling Sweetwater's case that was the wrong way to go. The band had only been together a short time, and had no prior studio experience. Hassinger kept his hand on the wheel in the control room, insisting that the tunes be less than three minutes long; but he clearly had no idea what they were trying to do musically (in what seems today an egregious oversight, he never saw the group perform live, and so had no sense of the excitement generated by their stage shows), and the band pretty much went their own way in the studio. This resulted in a riotous, free-wheeling, eccentric and unclassifiable album of original songs (written by Herrera, Del Zoppo and Nevins) called Sweetwater, which the label had no idea how to market. The band's live gigs were knocking audiences out, and the record store shelves would empty in any city the day after they played, but as far as any real marketing was concerned, the group felt that they were left out in the cold. No promotion meant very little AM radio play, which meant no hit single, which in turn meant no future promotion budget, and that was the circle in those days. Different stations around the country would play assorted tracks from their debut album, but there was no coherent marketing push from their label for the "official" single, "What's Wrong," and eventually the album's sales tapered off.

Touring with seven (or sometimes eight) musicians, one roadie and all those instruments was no joke. Nevins, only eighteen years old at the time and the only woman in the group, was sheltered to a great extent by the men. "They protected me like brothers," she says today. "They treated me fabulously, and took care of me beautifully. I never had any problems on the road, because they stood between me and all that stuff. They treated me like a princess." Drugs weren't much of an issue, considering the era; there was a band rule never to play loaded, and generally it was adhered to. Financially they weren't making much except at the major pop festivals, where they commanded headline status over Joe Cocker in Florida and over a young Chicago in Phoenix. But most of the time it was college dates in small towns, and unlikely as it seems today, they were flying everywhere. They did drive on occasion, if the gig was nearby, and they did do one bus tour during their last summer as a band, but mostly the money went to the airlines and hotels. Herrera says, "Usually the guys would double up, and we always saw that Nancy had a room to herself, which worked out pretty well, but then we always needed eight plane tickets. We played with just about every group of repute, and in just about every major and minor venue that had any kind of rep at all, and we had a huge overhead. Just talking about the L.A. area, we played at the Inglewood Forum with The Doors and Jerry Lee Lewis; the Anaheim Convention Center with The Beach Boys; the Shrine Auditorium with Canned Heat; the Whiskey with Moby Grape; at Melodyland, again with The Beach Boys; and we did a lot of jobs with the Doors and The Mothers of Invention. And we also crossed musical boundaries; because of our jazz influences, we opened for both Duke Ellington and Hugh Masakela at different times, playing on a jazz bill to a straight jazz audience. Bill Siddons, who was the Doors' manager, was friends with Bruce Glatman, and gave us a lot of work. A new amplifier company had just come out, called Acoustic Control, and our friend Harvey Gerst was their rep. He got us an incredible endorsement deal, a presentation deal, whereby we were laid out with a whole complement of amplifiers for free, and we used their equipment exclusively on the road. Since The Doors were also with Acoustic, we did a lot of shows with them where we had a huge wall of sound, we just did one big amp setup and left the equipment standing all night. And every place we went Harvey went with us and demonstrated the equipment to other artists on the bill, if it was a rock festival, and so he started playing guitar with us sometimes, since of course he knew all our songs from hearing us every night on the road."

"Then we started doing these major rock festivals that were starting to crop up, each one having the largest audience of any one up till that time, then the next one would be bigger, and so forth. We played one in Miami, the Miami Pop Festival, which at that time was the biggest rock concert that had ever been held, which was for about 50,000 people. Then we did the Omni Stadium in Atlanta for the Atlanta Pop Festival, and we did one in Dallas where this guy called Beethoven, who was a sort of groupie who often turned up at these festivals, picked up a Coke or Pepsi or something and poured it all over Alex as he was playing a solo, and all that sticky stuff went down his fingers and into his keyboard and all that, and the guy says, well, I wanted to cool you off, man, you were so hot! I just started laughing. And we played at a pop festival here in L.A. in June of 1969, just before Woodstock. It was supposed to tie in with the Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, RI; they wanted it to be a combined jazz and pop festival and tie it in somehow with Newport. So they had a number of rock groups and jazz groups, The Herb Ellis Big Band and Hugh Masakela, and then very late in the planning stages they couldn't secure Newport Beach, which was where they planned to have it to take advantage of the similar name. So instead they had it at Devonshire Downs in Northridge, which at that time was a huge farmland open area, and there were about 250,000 people there, by pretty reputable estimates. Jimi Hendrix was on it, he played right before us. Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, I think Santana, you name it. And nobody talks much about that concert today, they always talk about Woodstock, but up until that time this 250,000 crowd just blitzed, by about five times, the number of people that had ever been to a rock festival of any kind. But a few months later Woodstock happened, so nobody remembers this one."

Del Zoppo recalls playing the Fillmore West with The Chambers Brothers and Jeff Beck. "The interesting thing to me was that as our album sales picked up and things started to really get going for us, we always had enough interest that we were in a significant position on the bill with artists who were actually bigger than we were. We headlined over Chicago, for instance, though in retrospect it's hard to believe it since they later became such a monster group. We met Steve Miller and became good friends with those guys, and headlined over them a couple of times, and we topped a bill over the Allman Brothers in Florida. We met Santana up in San Francisco too; he was interested in the fact that we had a conga drummer playing with us full time. I remember doing the Kinetic Playground in Chicago with Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, and Fillmore East a couple of times. One night we played the Fillmore East with The Who, and the place caught fire! We were next door at Ratner's Deli, having dinner with Big Brother & the Holding Company, who were also on the show. We were sitting there eating and all of a sudden we saw all these people running around outside and heard all this commotion. Well, if you remember, the Fillmore East was built into a huge building that had other businesses along the side of it, and this dry-cleaning business had a boiler blow up and it set the building on fire. The place started filling up with smoke, and the only person who noticed it was, of all things, a narc who was in the audience. He ran up on stage during the Who's set, and announced that there was a fire, and at that point I think it was Entwhistle or somebody just knocked his butt clean off the stage. Knocked him right into the orchestra pit. They thought he was just some idiot who was running up on stage! Anyway they just had to evacuate the place, but there was no serious damage. We also played at the Whiskey with Steely Dan, Big Brother, and a bunch of others. Then because of the amp tie-in, we got to play a lot of shows with the Doors. And I remember one time when the Doors were doing a big show at the Hollywood Bowl, Acoustic called in everyone's Acoustic amp who lived anywhere near L.A., they borrowed back ours and everyone else's amps to make this massive setup for the Doors. They must have had a hundred of them; talk about your wall of sound! It was real strange. I saw it all set up, and I couldn't believe it."

At the time Sweetwater was booked to play at Woodstock, they were told that it was just another big rock concert. The advance hype said that the attendance would be enormous, but the group had heard all that before; every major festival they had played was supposed to be the "biggest" ever, and would eclipse previous records. So they were in no way prepared for the reality. Booked to perform for expense money only, they were stunned when they saw the size of the crowd. Del Zoppo says, "We had already played a number of really major, major festivals, so when Woodstock was first mentioned, we thought it was just more of the same, and located in such an obscure little place in the middle of nowhere that no one thought it would amount to much. Little did we know! And then we became a part of history. If you add up all the people in all the bands who played at the original Woodstock, there were probably only about a hundred and fifty, if that. And when you're one of those people it really makes you stop and think. And only about a hundred of them are still alive."

Herrera recalls: "Woodstock was an amazing situation. We tried to drive in, first of all. We got about half way and then we just couldn't go any further, we couldn't even drive across the field. So they called in by radio and brought some helicopters, landed them in a field and we just got in and flew backstage. I was in the helicopter with the Swami Satchedananda. Our equipment had already arrived the day before and our roadie was trying to set it up. And when the helicopter came over the hill we saw this amazing sight laid out before us; as far as you could see it was just covered with people. I couldn't believe it. Our performance, from what I remember, was slightly disoriented. Well, we were the first group on, on the first night, which was at our own request due to a specific deadline that Alex had where he HAD to get back to L.A. by a certain time. So things weren't quite together on the stage, but we had to go on anyway in order to leave there that night and get back to L.A. by the next morning. Richie Havens went on first, because he was acoustic and he was already there and didn't need any setup. If you've seen him in the movie, that's our equipment already set up there behind him. Anyway he played, and then they threw on the Swami to give some kind of little talk, and then we went on as the first band. So we were, essentially, the sound crew's soundcheck. And they would intermittently cut out our vocals and our instruments from the stage monitors, so we were always in a changing, disoriented situation where we could sometimes hear one another, sometimes not. It was really strange. No one brought a sound crew; the Woodstock staff did everything. Had we known, we might have tried to bring someone, but with all the confusion and that many people, it caught everybody by surprise. They were understaffed in every way. We had our roadie backstage just trying to see that everything was in some kind of order, but we didn't have anyone out in front. So I left there thinking that our show was really bad. Later I got the tapes from Warner Brothers and I couldn't STAND the way we sounded. So I put them away in my garage, and then last year I pulled them out and listened to them again, and although they were still not good, they were nowhere near as bad as I had been remembering them!"

"When we left the stage after our set, the group split up. Nancy, Alex and I left a few hours after our show, but some of the others in the group were stuck there for the whole duration. Albert, Pete, August and Alan separated from each other and from our road guy, and everybody just sort of scattered to the four winds and were left to their own devices to get back. So we left on the last helicopter out of town, and a storm was blowing in. We had to get Alex back to L.A., so since there was limited space on the helicopters Alex and Nancy had to go, because she wasn't feeling very well. And we got space on one of the medical helicopters, actually, because some girl had fallen off the stage and hurt her back, and they had to airlift her out of there. But we got caught in the storm, and the helicopter ran out of gas because the pilot got lost. So we had to land in this small private airfield, with just a small building that was closed for the night. And everything was pitch black, and we knew not where we were. Somehow they were able to radio for help, and an ambulance showed up and took the injured girl and drove off into the night, without giving us a chance to even ask where we were. We felt like we were on Mars; we saw a phone booth, finally, so we could call out but we didn't know where we were so we couldn't tell anyone where to pick us up. Finally we got through to our hotel, and found out that the roadie and Albert had taken our equipment truck back to the Holiday Inn and crashed the truck right into the overhang of the hotel. And I'm sitting on this bench in the rain in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, thinking "how can anything get any worse than this," when they told me that we had to wait until morning to get picked up. So Nancy, Alex and I finally got back to the hotel to find that we now had ONE hotel room for all seven of us in the Holiday Inn. They had re-rented our rooms! Joan Baez needed something like ten rooms for her party. So anyway we went to our one room and unlocked the door, and there were thirteen people crashed in the room, only three of whom we actually recognized. Some guy was literally sleeping in the bathtub. So we couldn't sleep, there was no room, so we stuck Albert's and Alan's plane tickets in their pockets while they were asleep and went back to the airport and went to New York, thinking we'd get a plane back to L.A. Of course all the planes were backed up and we had to sit there the whole day. And I think Alex had better tell you his part of the story from there, but anyway our next gig wasn't till two weeks later in Las Vegas, so nobody really knew what happened to anybody else until we all came dribbling into Las Vegas two weeks later, all having our own different stories of the adventures we had had. Pete happened to hitchhike back to the hotel in Woodstock with some guys who were smoking joints, and they all got busted and he spent three days in jail. Alan stayed in New York to meet up with his folks for a family wedding. Albert went to visit some relatives in Pittsburgh and then got on a plane, supposedly to go back to L.A., but he found out it was a plane to Seattle, and he had to talk the airline into getting him a transfer flight to L.A. and then to Vegas. August met some girl and went home with her and stayed for a week in Connecticut. And Nancy went home sick. Alex, anyway, was in the Air Force Reserve. And he was supposed to report to base that next morning, Saturday, after we played Woodstock or they were going to fry his ass. And we didn't get him there of course. We didn't know what was going on, if they had locked him up and thrown away the key or what. So then we played the concert in Vegas, opening for Cream, and that was one of their last concerts in the United States before they broke up."

Meanwhile, Del Zoppo was in big trouble with the Air Force. "I had to get back to California the Saturday morning of Woodstock, after playing on Friday night, because I was supposed to report to the summer camp in the Air Force Reserves and that date COULD NOT be changed. As a matter of fact, I had to have short hair for a couple of years when the group first started out, because of the one weekend a month I had to report in for duty. So a lot of times I'd try to walk in the stage entrance somewhere, and they'd think I was a narc or something, they didn't believe I was one of the musicians. It was really a weird set of circumstances in those days, always feeling the stress of Viet Nam. When you look at it, my duty caused a lot of our problems at Woodstock, because we had to go on before they had the sound really together, and so we ended up sounding like shit. We couldn't hear each other, because the stage monitors weren't working right. By the time we got to the end of our set, though, we were getting it in gear. Anyhow, we were staying with a lot of the other musicians at the Holiday Inn there in a little town called Liberty, next to Woodstock. All the traffic was backed up for miles, and no one could get in or out. Everything was just stuck, three lanes of cars in each direction absolutely dead in the water. I took a picture and the headline story from the local paper about the traffic jam back to the Air Force guys two days later, to try to explain why I couldn't get back on time. They didn't like that excuse, though. But anyway, we couldn't get in, so they flew us there in helicopters. When you fly over a hill and you see from horizon to horizon one huge thing, and it turns out it's a mass of people, it was just astounding. So we did our set, after the swami made his speech, and the next thing we knew the fences came down and all these people just came streaming in. Then after our set there was no way to get out, and I was really worried, because of the Air Force thing. So I asked for the first hop out whenever they had one leaving, and they flew us out on a medical chopper and it ran out of gas! Weirdest thing in the world, we were way out there in the Catskills, and once you got away from the festival site it was pitch black, no lights, nothing. We set down in a closed airfield, and ended up sleeping there all night in the helicopter till they opened the airport the next morning. And of course I was supposed to be in Riverside, California that same morning at 7 a.m. And they were very unhappy with me. Now this was 1969, and Viet Nam was raging big time, and these guys had the power to what they called "activate" a particular person within a Reserve unit if he screwed up enough times, or did something that made them mad. His punishment would be that they would activate him and transfer him to a unit that was actually serving in Viet Nam. So I was living with that threat from day to day, and then I was already on their shit list because they thought I was a Commie for hanging out with rock and roll musicians. So I got back two days late, and they were really on my case, and I was worried out of my mind. But I got through the summer camp, and it turned out that in the long run, our manager finally said, why don't we do something about this. And basically I got a medical discharge, because I was "nuts". Too many drugs, suicidal depression, those kinds of reasons. Although this was all tongue in cheek, the people at the Air Force let me go. And it was like night and day. I was free, suddenly, and consequently went completely nuts, and didn't cut my hair for three years!"

Nevins remembers, "We had played on so many of these pop festivals that we thought that Woodstock was just going to be the same thing again. First of all, when we got to the Holiday Inn, everything was quite insane. There was all this activity there, but nobody seemed to have a plan. It was all very disorganized. And I remember just milling around in the halls in the Holiday Inn and thinking how strange it was, and it was a hot August day, and then we all piled into cars and headed for the site and the road bogged down. Then they flew us in in helicopters, which was more exciting than I ever wanted it to be. I don't like flying in anything small. When we were deposited there, it was complete chaos backstage, nobody knew what was going on, and we didn't really realize the magnitude of what was happening in the way that we do today. We were just caught up in the center of this whirlwind of activity, and I remember standing on the stage when the Swami Satchedananda was on right before us, and thinking, what the heck is going on? I had never seen anything like this before. Then we went on, and we were too spread apart from each other on the stage, and there were cables all over the place, and the sound, at least onstage, was terrible. And there was a pit of media in front of the stage, about ten feet deep, and I had never seen that before at any of the other festivals, and all I could think of was this milling swirl of snakes. And that made me feel awkward, because I was used to seeing real music lovers, real people, at the front of the stage, and seeing all these media people made me feel intimidated. It was hard to hear each other and I felt very disconnected, and I couldn't find that joyful congruity of sound that we usually had. Then after what seemed like a short time but was our regular set, forty-five minutes, we were done, and we left the stage. I felt really unhappy and thought we hadn't done very well. Freddy and Alex and I stayed together, with Brian our roadie, and we got on a helicopter to leave at about dusk. Up went the helicopter, and night was falling over upstate New York, and we were going home. We thought. Just as darkness fell the helicopter ran out of gas, and he set us down on a little one-runway airport and we went into this little hangar to use the bathroom, and when we came out the place was closed. They had no gas, and we had to wait there all night. Someone came and got us the next morning, and we got back and found out that Albert had driven the equipment truck into the overhang of the hotel, so the Holiday Inn didn't think much of us either. I remember thinking when we were finally flying home, well thank God that's over, it was an awful experience. Then when we got home Woodstock was breaking on all the network news shows and they were talking about what an incredible event it was. I remember thinking, huh? And getting a strong sense of media influence about the whole thing."

Since the spring of 1969, Sweetwater had been getting more and more offers to do network television variety shows like The Hollywood Palace, The Steve Allen Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and others. In December that year they taped an episode of the Red Skelton television show, and had arranged to gather at Del Zoppo's house the night of December 8th to watch it when it aired. It was a dark and rainy night, and the Southern California roads were slick with oil. On her way to the gathering Nevins' car was rear-ended on the freeway by a drunken driver. She suffered severe brain trauma from the impact, and as they closed the ambulance door behind her she went into grand mal seizures from the tremendous blow to her head. In one of life's great coincidences, they took her to nearby Glendale Memorial Hospital, on the one night of the month when all the neurologists in Southern California were meeting there, and this fortuitous circumstance probably saved her life. She was in a coma for nearly two weeks with life-support equipment and tubes down her throat, which in turn caused an irreversible scarring on her vocal cords. The other group members were waiting for her to show up, but when they got the call from her mother they drove straight to the hospital. To relieve pressure in her head cavity the doctors drilled two holes in her skull to drain the fluid. She was given almost no chance of recovery, and was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Del Zoppo remembers sitting in the hospital waiting room praying that she would live, and hearing the doctors tell her mother that even if she did survive she would probably have permanent brain damage. Nevins' cohort and early singing partner from high school, Diane Mellon, was in the car with her, but was unhurt; she disappeared from Nevins' life immediately after the accident, and has never been heard from since.

"Well, I lived," says Nevins. "I had the last rites, and they said this girl will not live, no one can survive a head injury like that. Then I lived for a few days, and they began to revise that, and they said if I lived I'd be a vegetable. Ten days along in my coma they tried something to shock my lungs into breathing and it had some positive effect on me in the coma and I came out of it, but with a completely damaged voice. My vocal cords were split. I had lost an incredible amount of weight; I was 5'9" and I ended up weighing 105 pounds and I was totally weak; and do you know I took my first walk down the hospital corridor with Alex? He was very devoted, he came to see me on a daily basis, and so did Fred. I was in the hospital for about a month, and then they sent me home; I was home for two days and all of a sudden I couldn't breathe at all. I was literally gasping for every single ounce of air, and I got rushed back to the hospital. And they cut my throat open to do a tracheotomy, and they discovered that the life support apparatus had so damaged my right vocal cord that polyps had grown on it as scar tissue. I had six throat operations to whittle down the polyps that had grown just from the rubbing of the breathing apparatus. After the sixth operation they had to stop doing that, because they were concerned about accidentally cutting the cord itself. So they closed the hole in my throat back up and sent me home. I had petit mal seizures for twelve years after the accident; and I lost the only thing I ever cared about, which was my voice." Barely twenty years old, she thought her life was over.

Sweetwater had almost eighteen months' worth of advance bookings lined up when the accident happened. They desperately hoped from week to week and month to month that Nevins, whose singing voice was an integral part of their sound, would be well enough to rejoin them, but as time went by and it became apparent that her recovery was going to be a time-consuming process, they went ahead and played the dates, mostly college concerts and a couple of pop festivals, without her. After several months, auditions were held to try to replace her, but her unique vocal style couldn't be duplicated and no one else among the over thirty hopefuls they tried out had her intuitive feeling for the band's weird instrumental patterns. Still hoping for Nevins' eventual return, they suspended all recording, not a good career move since it was imperative that they do a followup to the first album as soon as possible. They also cancelled all their pending network television appearances, which had been coming at increasingly regular intervals, because of the missing visual element caused by her absence. This "marking time" dealt the group a severe blow, one from which they never really came back.

At the time of the car accident Sweetwater had already written all the songs for their second Reprise album, Just For You, and had actually recorded two tracks that included Nevins' lead vocals. To finish the album, Moore was brought forward as a lead vocalist on a few tracks, and Del Zoppo and Herrera sang on a couple of others. Nevins was eventually able to sing background on one or two tunes, so she was represented on the album even though she couldn't tour with them to support it. Noted producer Richard Perry at one point tried his hand on the group, demoing one session with them for the second album, but nothing clicked. But Nevins' absence from the album in a lead singer capacity affected sales, and their third album, Melon, was a folk-oriented album, at least partly in deference to her still greatly reduced vocal capacity, and sold less still. The group was on the verge of disintegrating, and they hoped that Melon would contain the magic hit that would revive their career, but internal pressures were mounting. Although they were still fulfilling their outstanding bookings, during the process of recording Melon things got to the point where the band members would come into the studio one at a time to lay down their parts, with Herrera overseeing the continuity and even doing the final mix when the engineer failed to show.

Sweetwater officially broke up in the summer of 1971; they played their last gig in June or July of that year in San Diego. The dissolution was partly because of Nevins' car accident, which had derailed their career when it was going full steam ahead, and partly because of the afore-mentioned internal pressures within the group. Watching their contemporaries likes Chicago and Steppenwolf, whom they had once headlined over, pass them in popularity and record sales while they made little or no progress, was such a disheartening experience that some of the group members lost interest. Drummer Malarowitz, who was planning to get married, left the group, and was replaced briefly by Ricky Fataar, whom they found through an ad in the paper. Del Zoppo was dissatisfied with the way their manager, Bruce Glatman, was handling their finances, both in the area of unpaid songwriting royalties and in the way the group's performance fees were being administered. "I just didn't think we were being treated fairly at all. All of a sudden we realized we had never gotten paid a cent for our songwriting, which really pissed me off. I felt like we had started this thing because we really loved the music, and then once we got into the business it all got taken away from us. We became a machine, working on a salary--if you can believe this, we only got paid a fixed, box-boy salary per week each, all the time that Sweetwater was together! All those huge rock festivals and concerts and tours, it was always just the same small weekly salary. Where did the rest of the money go? And we felt like we were working for somebody else instead of for ourselves. So everybody kind of agreed at the same time to just let it go. Right before we broke up, we FINALLY talked Warner Brothers-Reprise into recording us live, and they brought a 16-track machine out to a couple of gigs; but then we broke up, so they never released any of it, and all that stuff is still somewhere in the can."

Even in the rock and roll world, where living fast and dying young have become de rigueur, Sweetwater had an unusually high mortality rate. Drummer Alan Malarowitz continued doing occasional freelance session work, usually at Herrera's recommendation. One night in the summer of 1981, after the two had finished a demo session together for a mutual friend, they decided to go to Las Vegas. At the last minute Herrera had to cancel, but Malarowitz went ahead without him. Driving across the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas at night, he evidently fell asleep at the wheel, his car overturned into an embankment, and he was killed instantly. In an odd coincidence, just a year later Malarowitz's sister and her husband and their two children, the Solomon family, vanished without trace from their home in Northridge, CA. It's still an unsolved mystery, and is mentioned yearly in the papers under the heading of strange cases of disappearance. At some point someone actually confessed to the crime, but in a technicality was released because of double jeopardy and the fact that the bodies were never found.

When the group broke up, cellist August Burns still hoped to pursue his original career dream of becoming a classical music conductor; he moved to Germany for further study in that field. It was while living there in 1982 that he was riding in an outside, open-air construction elevator, and he fell out of it. Although he survived the fall, he contracted pneumonia in the hospital and died there.

Except for Del Zoppo, Herrera and Malarowitz, the members of the group had lost touch with each other until the 20th anniversary of Woodstock in 1989 which inspired several "where are they now" articles. Nevins wrote to the Los Angeles Times in response to one such article; Herrera saw her letter in print, mentioned it to Del Zoppo, and the three were reunited. But no one knew where Albert Moore had gone, until Moore's cousin called Del Zoppo in April of 1994 to tell him that Moore had died in February of that year of lung cancer. After Sweetwater had broken up, Moore had been in and out of various groups, and had also worked in the clothing business and as a school teacher, but his thirty year long smoking habit killed him at age 54. He was married and had one daughter.

Today, two of the three surviving core group members are still working in the music business. After Sweetwater broke up, Fred Herrera toured as a bass player with various artists including Chi Coltrane and Oliver (of "Good Morning Starshine" and "Jean" fame), and along with Alex Del Zoppo was in Johnny Tillotson's backup band. He also worked full time for over fifteen years doing lead sheets, and has been doing film music, television music, symphony scoring, and record producing and contracting work on a freelance basis. He's worked with New Age artist Yanni as a contractor and orchestra manager, and has worked with artists in the Latin music market in several capacities. Del Zoppo and Moore formed a short-lived group called Woodpecker with Moore's cousin Bootsy Parker and another singer named Charles Brinkley. Woodpecker was together for less than a year, very little happened, and Del Zoppo went out on the road with Tillotson on and off for several years. He cut some tracks with Ricky Fataar that ended up on a Beach Boys album, played briefly with Eric Burdon in a group called Said, and worked with Herrera in another short-lived rock band called Avalon. In the late Seventies he quit the music business to work as a building contractor, and lost track of the other members of Sweetwater until the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, when a "where are they now" article reunited them. Then, at a birthday party for Herrera, Nevins and Del Zoppo started singing some old Sweetwater songs to surprise him, and they began working up old and new material as a trio.

Nancy Nevins spent years in physical therapy, learning to talk and eventually to sing again. She worked with specialists, taking lessons to strengthen her left vocal cord to compensate for the lost right one. A well-known Hollywood vocal coach, Seth Riggs, who had worked with celebrities like Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, taught her classical exercises to enable her to speak using her pharyngeal voice and to learn to sing again. She never regained the phenomenal belting power she once had, but has a pleasant, slightly husky singing voice. She worked constantly to develop a new style, and tried to revive her career as a solo artist. "I couldn't stand having been so close," she says. "I just couldn't stand it. We had almost made it, and then the accident happened. So I put some little bands together, and I did songwriters' showcases." She signed with Tom Catalano, Neil Diamond's producer, who convinced RCA to back his fledgling Tom Cat Records with Nevins as the flagship artist. She released one solo album of originals, but the label folded after only two years. Still prey to petit mal seizures, she was tired of the stress of the business. "I felt like a failure. I couldn't save Sweetwater, I had to go and screw everything up by getting in an accident, and then I couldn't get anywhere on my own, and I thought everything was all my fault, and self-pity took over. I was heartbroken, and in 1976 I just quit." She married and divorced, and when the accident insurance money ran out she got a job cleaning houses. Several years later she went back to college, got her degree, and is currently working as a college English teacher in the Orange County (CA) school system. She also continues to write songs, and plays piano and guitar.

Conga player Pete Cobian was last heard of working at Warner Brothers Films as an underwater welder and set technician, but no one in Sweetwater has heard from him in several years. Harvey Gerst, who was unfortunately not available for this interview, now lives near Dallas, where he has a small recording studio. And Herrera, Del Zoppo and Nevins, spurred by a renewal of interest in the group since the publicity splash surrounding the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, are still writing songs, and working together to create a new, contemporary sound for Sweetwater, in a less cluttered, more stripped-down group format. "I really want Sweetwater to get together again," Nevins says. "Of course it won't be the same as it used to be, with Albert gone, but we want to bring something fresh out of ourselves. Because we had something that felt so incredible, and the audiences knew it and felt it, and we still have that. It would be nice if Warner Brothers would reissue some of our albums on CD, for one thing, but the new music we've been working on all this time, individually, is just as good as the old stuff."

Recently Herrera, Del Zoppo and Nevins entered the studio together for the first time in nearly a quarter-century to demo new original material. The results were exciting to all concerned, and the three look forward to a renewed, revitalized career in the music world they've been part of for so long.