Sweetwater’s Story Flows Onto Screen

Nancy Nevins watched the movie of her life the other day. And though she thought some important things were missing--especially her singing voice--Nevins is thrilled that Sweetwater, the long-lost opening band at the original Woodstock festival, has been found again.

“Sweetwater: A True Rock Story” premieres Sunday on VH1 (Review, F2). It is the first movie the rock video channel has produced.

“It was so emotional. I couldn’t believe how emotional it was,” Nevins, 49, said Thursday over the phone from her home in Tujunga, a day after she had seen a preview.

Viewers will hear 30-year-old original recordings by Sweetwater, but with Nevins’ vocals erased and replaced by the voice of Amy Jo Johnson, who plays Nevins as a young woman.

“I really wished they had used my vocals, and I fought for it,” said Nevins, who spelled her name “Nansi” in the ‘60s. “They said my singing voice didn’t match her speaking voice. I had to let that go and say, ‘This is an artist too. Let her give her interpretation.’ She does a good job, but it isn’t me.”

Also missing, Nevins said, are the 17 years she lived in Laguna Beach, where she rebuilt her life in a way that would seem made for TV: Having “hit bottom” in the mid-1970s from drug and alcohol abuse, she moved to Laguna in 1978.

After a brief marriage, the woman who had shared bills with the Who, the Doors and Janis Joplin and had sung for the Woodstock masses as a willowy 19-year-old clad in a peasant dress, found herself cleaning houses for a living.

A New Career in the Classroom

Nevins put herself through college and graduate studies and made a new career for herself as a college instructor, teaching English at Fullerton College, Cypress College and other schools.

But she never quite put her rock ‘n’ roll days behind her: “I have always been obsessed with Sweetwater,” she said. “Ours is a story of great unfinished business.”

Sweetwater formed in 1967, a racially integrated, multiethnic Los Angeles group that used Latin rhythms, a flute, a cello and no guitars. Its first album came out in 1969. With its manager well-connected with rock impresario Bill Graham, Sweetwater got plum gigs at the Fillmore East and Fillmore West and a spot on the Woodstock bill.

It was the first band to play after Richie Havens opened the festival with a galvanic, career-making solo performance. Sweetwater’s Woodstock experience wasn’t epochal. The band played 45 minutes, trying not to be overawed by the sea of humanity in front of it.

Then, spooked by the disorganized vibe backstage at a point when the festival seemed about to spin out of control, it beat a retreat to L.A. There, Sweetwater’s members were shocked to discover that the incipient chaos they fled had blossomed into an instant hippie legend of peace, love and immortal performances.

But Sweetwater still had a chance to build its own legend. It played on national TV, on “The Red Skelton Show.” On Dec. 8, 1969, Nevins was driving to the home of Alex Del Zoppo, the Sweetwater keyboard player who was her lover. They were on that night’s “Steve Allen Show,” and were going to watch it together.

Instead, Nevins’ Buick was crunched from behind, leaving her with serious head and throat injuries. After six surgeries and two months in the hospital, she emerged with a damaged vocal cord. She sang on two more Sweetwater albums, but it was a strain to perform in the studio, and touring was impossible. The band broke up and its members drifted apart.

Nevins, now singing in a tawnier, less dulcet voice, released a solo album in 1975, but her record company folded; meanwhile, she had substance-abuse problems to grapple with. Sweetwater was a memory, to be resurrected occasionally by journalists seeking an offbeat angle for pieces on Woodstock, 20 or 25 years later.

But in 1995, Nevins found herself sitting late into the night in a Fullerton coffee shop, talking about the old days with Fred Herrera, the Sweetwater bassist and bandleader who had tracked her down.

Nevins had not been in touch with her old band mates for more than 20 years. She learned from Herrera that three of them were dead: flutist Albert Moore from lung cancer, drummer Alan Malorowitz in a car wreck, and cellist August Burns of pneumonia after a fall down an elevator shaft in Germany.

The surviving members--except for conga player Elpidio Cobian, who isn’t taking part in the reunion--jammed for the first time at Herrera’s birthday party in ‘95; they enjoyed themselves, recruited a drummer, a conga player and, for the first time, a guitarist, and began to play occasional gigs in Los Angeles. Nevins continued to teach but moved back to the Los Angeles area to be “closer to what was going on” with the band.

In 1997, she spent a semester of lunch hours writing longhand on a yellow legal pad in the faculty dining room at Glendale College, getting down the story of her life. With a friend, Joe Graves, who is an actor, screenwriter and Sweetwater fan, Nevins turned the memoir into a film script. Some interested producers took it to VH1 executives, who bought the rights to Sweetwater’s story but had the script redone.

Fictional Device

to Tell the Story

Nevins said the movie uses a fictional framing device in which a troubled producer for a video channel, played by Kelli Williams, is assigned to track down Sweetwater, the missing link in the Woodstock legend.

The character finds Del Zoppo, played by Frederic Forrest, and they search for Nevins while the Sweetwater story is told in flashbacks, with a focus on the Nevins-Del Zoppo romance. Finally, they find the middle-aged Nevins, played by Michelle Phillips, teaching in a college classroom.

In the end, Phillips is seen singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the first song Nevins ever performed with Sweetwater. But this time the actress is seen, not heard. Phillips, who was a singing star with the Mamas and the Papas before she became an actress, lip-syncs the performance. The voice is Nevins’--not the sweet young hippie of 19, but her new voice as a grown woman bidding for a comeback in middle age.

During the past week, Sweetwater’s story has been told on VH1 as part of a “Where Are They Now--Woodstock” feature, and in a half-hour “Behind the Movie--Sweetwater” preview that runs again today at 12:30 p.m.

On Monday, Sweetwater’s long-missing music will become available again with the release of “Sweetwater/Cycles,” which compiles tracks from the band’s three 1969-1971 albums originally issued by Reprise, as well as unreleased studio songs, some live-at-Woodstock material, and a new song, “Home Again.” It’s limited edition release available only via the internet at www.rhinohandmade.com.

For the first time in 10 years, Nevins won’t be in the classroom when the fall semester begins. She hopes to be out on tour with Sweetwater and recording an album of new material. And she still is trying to have the script that evolved from her lunchtime memoir-writing made into a feature film, telling the Sweetwater story as she lived it.

“There’s a lot of pressure right now. Good excitement and bad excitement are both stressful,” she said. She is prepared to spend some time away from the quiet niche she has found, a small house in the Verdugo foothills that she shares with a cat, with two tall pine trees out front.

“I used to spend a lot of time in the garden before I became a rock star again,” Nevins said with a laugh.

* VH1 will show “Sweetwater: A True Rock Story,” Sunday at 9 and 11 p.m., Monday at 7 p.m., Wednesday at noon and Thursday at 10 p.m.