They Played on the Main Stage at Woodstock 50 Years Ago—No, Really – The Wall Street Journal

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It’s been said if you remember Woodstock, you weren’t there. Mr. Stone and other lesser-known musicians were there, but few remember them.

“If I bring it up, people think I’m joking,” said Robert Leonard, a respected forensic linguist based at Hofstra University in New York. He is a former member of the ‘50s-themed group Sha Na Na, which performed right before Hendrix closed the musical extravaganza that drew some 450,000 fans to a farm in Bethel, N.Y.

Sha Na Na began as a vocal ensemble at Columbia University, and most of its members had their sights on professions other than music. Besides, after Woodstock and all the rest, what’s left for an encore?

“I played with Jimi Hendrix. I drank with Janis Joplin,” Mr. Leonard said. “Maybe I had done enough.”

A handful of the surviving Woodstock legends still draw sellout crowds. But, like Professor Leonard, many of the 166 artists at Woodstock ended up in careers outside of rock ’n’ roll.

“Instead of running a guitar wire to the amp, I ran a business,” said Mr. Stone, 71 years old. Over the years, Mr. Stone went from trying to sell records to successfully selling houses in Connecticut’s affluent Fairfield County.

He still plays dozens of concerts a year with his Stone Band, a group that includes his wife, Maxine, a singer. Mr. Stone is also scheduled to perform at a 50th anniversary celebration this weekend at the original Woodstock site, renamed the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.

This time, Mr. Stone won’t be on the main stage. But the Bedouin jacket he wore during his 1969 performance was rescued from obscurity in an exhibit at the Bethel Woods museum. “It’s just been hanging in the closet,” he said.

Professor Leonard’s former bandmate Elliot Cahn became a lawyer and, for a time, managed the band Green Day.

Other Woodstock performers also kept a hand in the business. Alex Del Zoppo, who played in the band Sweetwater, has provided music for industrial films. “It’s a different world. It’s not rock ’n’ roll,” he said.

In one job, he scored a promotional film for a department store in Thailand. He’s also done maintenance for apartment buildings and worked for builders.

Mr. Del Zoppo’s Woodstock story sometimes opens doors, he said, and sometimes “people back away from you,” perhaps reflecting a lingering generation gap.

In the late 1960s, Sweetwater was an on-the-rise group that played into the psychedelic spirit of the time. Lead singer Nancy Nevins said four months after the Woodstock gig she was in a car accident that derailed her and the group.

After that, Ms. Nevins said, she struggled financially, at one point cleaning houses. She eventually found her way into jobs teaching writing and literature at two community colleges in Southern California.

Occasionally, the subject of the Woodstock festival is brought up by students, Ms. Nevins said. Few, though, know much about it.

“Sometimes I just tell them it’s early Coachella,” she said, referring to the annual music festival in California.

Members of Sweetwater got the band back together some years ago. This summer they played at a library in Port Washington, N.Y., and a Los Angeles party marking the release of a 38-CD set from Warner Music Group’s Rhino Records division. The collection features nearly all the music from Woodstock, including the Sweetwater set.

While only hard-core listeners will likely sit through the entire 30-plus hours of music and announcements in the CD collection, Woodstock remains a cultural touchstone for many graying music fans.

Alan Cooper, another Sha Na Na member who performed at the 1969 festival, is a scholar of Jewish studies and faculty member at New York City’s Jewish Theological Seminary. When he hosts Torah discussions at synagogues, he said, he usually expects a limited audience.

If he adds a session recounting his experience singing at the festival, he can fill the place. Older congregation members are “all nostalgic about the ‘60s,” he said.

Rabbi Eric Yanoff hosted Mr. Cooper at Adath Israel, a temple outside of Philadelphia. The 1969 music festival, he said, is “a great story to pack a synagogue brunch.”

Yet time continues to chip away at the Woodstock generation.

Phil Thayer, a member of Quill, another of the lesser-known groups at the festival, lives in Casselberry, Fla., and delivers flowers in the Orlando area.

These days, his gigs are often with a 14-piece big band-style group that plays at nursing homes. “We bring music to people who can’t get out,” he said.

Write to Charles Passy at [email protected]