On Stage at Woodstock : Laguna’s Nancy de Jongh, Who Sang in Sweetwater, Recalls Festival’s Chaos

It was 20 years ago today that Nancy Nevins de Jongh walked on stage during the opening hours of Woodstock and began to sing.

Over the years, the epochal festival on a farm in Upstate New York has taken on a burnished glow in rock lore: a gathering of peaceful tribes. The high-water mark of the ‘60s counterculture. The birth of the commercial giant and mass-media force that rock was to become.

For de Jongh, whose band, Sweetwater, was the third act on the bill, Woodstock was nothing so lofty or enduring. It was a weekend that began with no great expectations, unfolded with worry, discomfort and frustration, devolved into farce and ended with regret. Twenty years on, de Jongh and Sweetwater have subsided into virtual oblivion, despite having played rock’s most famous show.

But as de Jongh sat the other day in her sunlit apartment overlooking the ocean in Laguna Beach, relating a tale that she seldom has been called upon to tell, there was nothing melancholy in the recounting. In the words of those more famed veterans of Woodstock, the Grateful Dead, a rock ‘n’ roll life brings the prerogative of being able to sit back and smile over “what a long, strange trip it’s been.” De Jongh’s story certainly qualifies.

Today she is a tall, trim woman whose appearance combines a professional look with an art-colony aesthetic: conservative, pastel-colored clothing, reddish hair worn in a neat, fashionable cut, an array of silver rings on her hands, and large, geometric metal shapes dangling from her ears.

When she walked out in front of all those people late in the afternoon of Aug. 15, 1969, she was Nansi Nevins, a tall, willowy 19-year-old with long, brown hair, a flowing peasant dress and a pure, forthright voice not unlike Grace Slick’s. With her were the seven other musicians--all men--who made up Sweetwater.

Based in Los Angeles, Sweetwater was notable for an ethnic makeup that included a black, two Latinos and a Czech, and for a musical lineup that de-emphasized guitar while making room for a folk-jazz-rock fusion featuring cello, piano, conga drums and flute.

By the summer of ‘69, the group was making its way eagerly in the rock world, having released “Sweetwater,” the first of three albums it would record for Reprise Records in 1969-71. The album notes heralded the band as “eight high-octane musicians who met and jammed in the great peanut butter octopus that is Los Angeles.”

When Woodstock rolled around, Sweetwater was an established touring attraction that had played the Fillmores East and West and shared bills with the likes of the Who, the Doors and Janis Joplin.

Nansi Nevins’ trip through ‘60s rock had begun with coffeehouse blues shows, played when she was still a Glendale high school girl. Early in 1967, she stepped on stage with an unwieldy, 26-piece jam band called Jay Walker and the Pedestrians and sang “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” In concentrated form, that group coalesced as Sweetwater.

They were taken in hand by a well-connected manager, Bruce Glattman, who got them a record deal and set them up with prominent bookings. “Bruce was a good friend of Bill Graham,” de Jongh recalled. “Graham booked us in the Fillmore all the time--East and West. We had a following, and we were a draw. I suppose that’s how we got the Woodstock booking.”

Sweetwater figured it was nothing to get too excited about. “We were on the circuit of pop festivals,” she said. “They were generally just hot and sweaty, and the music was hard to hear. We thought it was just another festival.”

On the Friday that began Woodstock, Sweetwater checked in at the Holiday Inn in Liberty, N.Y., which was a staging ground and nerve center for the festival’s performers and organizers.

“It seemed like everyone was running around with their heads cut off,” de Jongh said in a modulated, soft-textured voice. “I thought, ‘Now, this is a mess.’ I hadn’t seen that before (at festivals). Usually they were a lot more controlled. This one was really chaotic.

“We just plunked our bags in our rooms and threw on some clothes. It was a muggy, hot August day. We figured we’d jump in the car and just go out there to the stage. And then immediately the car stopped on this one-lane road, and anxiety set in. Just total gridlock.”

Organizers sent out helicopters to ferry stranded musicians to the festival. Having never flown in a helicopter, de Jongh had a frightful ride during which she thought of a harrowing plane flight Sweetwater had taken during a snowy tour of Canada.

When the band arrived backstage, Richie Havens had already finished the festival-opening set that pretty much made his career. On stage was act number two: a band of Hare Krishnas chanting in a circle.

De Jongh said: “I thought, ‘What could this be? This is ridiculous.’ I had a cynical outlook at this point. It was really crazy.”

De Jongh saw more signs of disorganization at the festival site. Amid the scurry, she picked up bits of discomfiting information: Organizers had lost control of the entrances, and people were pouring in without tickets. And a storm was blowing in.

De Jongh has few distinct memories of Sweetwater’s performance, other than that she was disappointed to find that there was a 15-foot-wide photographers’ pit separating the stage from the audience. Sweetwater’s act usually involved lots of close-range interaction with the crowd.

“We did a standard 45-minute set. I remember thinking that the other band members seemed really far away. We were spread out (on the large stage). It sounds hokey, but the crowd had really good vibes. It was hard not to just stare back at them, because it was so big.”

Even with good vibes from the audience, de Jongh and the other members still had deep misgivings about what they perceived as the lack of organization around them.

“It felt kind of dangerous,” she said. “I felt real harassed. And you felt real powerless and out of control. But if I was in the crowd, I probably would have thought ‘What a great party!’

“It always seemed while we were there that everything was on the edge of falling apart. By Saturday, everything probably got calmer because they knew what was going on by then. But Friday, nobody knew, and it could go either way.”

Sweetwater had already played on bills with many of the famous acts that were to follow, so band members thought that they would not be missing much by leaving right away. But leaving was not. Helicopters were coming in regularly at the backstage landing area, but there was a crush of people who had the same idea as Sweetwater and wanted to get back to the Holiday Inn. De Jongh recalled running repeatedly to catch a copter, only to be frustrated when someone else got there first.

After several hours passed, she and three others from Sweetwater were airborne. But within minutes, the helicopter was dropping in the dark.

“We started to go down,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘We’re gonna die!’ ” But the pilot managed to set the helicopter down at a tiny airfield somewhere near the festival. From there, he drove off in a car with two field attendants, abandoning the rockers to fend for themselves. They used a pay phone to summon help, but no help arrived until 3 a.m.

When they got back to the Holiday Inn, de Jongh said, they found that other band members who had driven there from the festival had smashed the roof of their U-Haul truck into the hotel’s entrance overhang.

“What could happen next? We decided we’d better get out of there,” she said.

The band drove to New York City, got on a plane and returned to Los Angeles. By the time they got back, “it was all over the news” that Woodstock had been a landmark event.

De Jongh said: “We were thinking, ‘Gosh, you’re kidding.’ We flew home, only to discover it was Woodstock we’d fled from. All I’ve heard for 20 years is what a great time everybody had. Sometimes I feel real sorry for myself. It was like missing a party.”

But missing out on history was soon the least of de Jongh’s problems. In December, 1969, a few days after Sweetwater had played on national TV on the Red Skelton Show, a drunk driver rammed into her car on the Ventura Freeway. The wreck put her in a 10-day coma and caused permanent damage to her vocal chords.

She worked to rehabilitate her voice, which took on a rougher, tawnier hue. But de Jongh’s injury and the layoff that followed were the first in a series of internal strains for Sweetwater that led to its breakup in 1971.

“I was so determined to keep going,” de Jongh said. “I moved into a little room in Laurel Canyon with a piano, and I started to learn more about the music business and about writing a tune.” She emerged in 1975 with a solo album for Tom Cat Records, a subsidiary of RCA. But the label folded, de Jongh said, and her career became nebulous again.

Her last public performance was a charity show at a veterans hospital in 1977. “I got real, real tired and stressed out,” she said, and decided to try family life instead. She married in 1978 and moved to Laguna Beach. By 1980, she was divorced and scraping for money.

“I had no job skills,” she said. “I started housecleaning for a living. I was real confused. I didn’t know if I could make it in music again.”

De Jongh stopped telling most people about her rock ‘n’ roll past: “I got real quiet. Housecleaning is real good for your humility. Would you believe it if your housecleaner came in and said, ‘I used to have a Mercedes and four albums?’ It was real character-building.”

De Jongh turned to writing in her spare time, while putting herself through college with her earnings as a housekeeper and a tutor. Now, no longer cleaning house, she is working toward a master’s degree in English at Cal State Fullerton.

Later this month, 20 years after Woodstock, she will step onto a smaller stage for a performance that may ultimately prove more significant in her personal, long, strange trip through life. The stage will be a classroom at Cal State Fullerton, where de Jongh will tackle her first regular teaching assignment as a part-time instructor in the college’s basic writing program.

Fiction writing is her main creative outlet these days. Although she still keeps an upright piano in her apartment, the prominent spot with the ocean view belongs to a computer terminal and printer.

De Jongh has fallen out of touch with her former Sweetwater band mates: August Burns, Alex Del Zoppo, Fred Herrera, Albert B. Moore, Elpidio Cobian, R.G. Carlyle and Alan Malarowitz.

“I generally don’t tell people about it,” she said of her life as a ‘60s rocker. But with the much-publicized festival anniversary upon us, de Jongh decided it might be time to recall Sweetwater’s comic-ironic footnote in Woodstock history.

“I’ve been waiting for 20 years for somebody to ask me what happened,” she said.