By: David Schultz

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair; a fact that you will no doubt be bombarded with over the next three days. While most people look at the festival in the context of today's festivals that tend to run with clockwork precision, what really stands out about Woodstock is the fact that as much as everyone may want to believe that it could happen again, it simply couldn't. The magic of Woodstock was a half million people treating each other kindly and with respect. Sadly, this will never happen in today's world. In a world of VIP passes, hyperactive youth and the Baby Boomers sense of entitlement to not be hassled when they go to any show, no festival of Woodstock's size and scope could ever give rise to a near unanimous communal spirit. It's what the Woodstock promoters found out at Woodstock 99.

The Woodstock generation made the festival's reputation but the music was pretty memorable as well. Many of the musicians went on to have legendary careers, others became footnotes. Here's what happened to the artists that walked the stage forty years ago.

Richie Havens
Being one of the few artists present when the Festival was about to start, Havens turned his impromptu opening slot at Woodstock into a small charter industry of kicking off festivals and concerts. He’s released dozens of albums, covering everyone from The Beatles and Dylan to The Who, with his most recent album, Nobody Left To Crown, being released near the end of 2008

Swami Satchidananda
The man who gave the opening benediction would start the Integral Yoga Institute and open the Light of Truth Universal Shrine. He passed away in 2002 and did not factor in the naming of Danananackroyd.

Sweetwater
No one would fault you for mistaking this group for Stillwater from Almost Famous. You would be wrong nonetheless. A few months after Woodstock, lead singer Nancy Nevins was injured in car accident, injuring her vocal cords and suffering brain damage. The band’s career never recovered.

The Incredible String Band
The Scottish folk group may have ceased playing in 1974 but you can still hear them in the psych-folk bands of today.

Bert Sommer
A folk singer who never saw any lasting success, Sommer would play with The Left Banke and appear in one of Sid & Marty Krofft’s lesser-known kids shows. He died in 1990.

Tim Hardin
The folkie was better known as a songwriter than a singer, penning the folk standard “If I Were A Carpenter” and Rod Stewart’s “Reason To Believe.” He spent most of his post-Woodstock life battling heroin addiction, dying of an overdose in 1980.

Ravi Shankar
The world’s most famous sitarist is best known for playing Woodstock and The Concert For Bangladesh. His friendship with George Harrison had a great influence on the Beatle’s solo work. Nowadays he may be best known for being Norah Jones’ father.

Melanie
The female folkie has a long unheralded career, continuously working and releasing albums at a decent clip.

Arlo Guthrie
The son of legendary Woody Guthrie, Arlo never had to rest on his father’s laurels. Nary does a Thanksgiving go by – or seem proper – without hearing “Alice’s Restaurant” on the radio and his Carnegie Hall performances are a New York tradition.

Joan Baez
Still a standard-bearer for the Woodstock generation, her post-Festival career has been marked by four decades of activism. She still appears at benefits and lends her voice to worthy causes. She opened the Philadelphia portion of Live Aid with “Amazing Grace” and recently appeared at the 50th anniversary of the Newport Folk Festival.

Quill
Never getting beyond cult band status, Quill broke up within months after playing Woodstock. They were one of the few bands that failed to parlay their appearance at the festival into any type of success.

Keef Hartley Band
Playing Woodstock was easily the high point, if not the only point, in this band’s short career. A jazzy combo, they released four albums before breaking up in 1972.

John Sebastian
A talented harmonica player and inductee into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, Sebastian’s post-Woodstock career will probably be best known for writing and singing the theme to Welcome Back Kotter.

Santana
One of the handful of artists that would perform at the 1994 Woodstock sellout and avoid the disastrous 1999 edition. Santana would spend the 70s as a Guitar God, the 80s and 90s as a borderline nostalgia act and then a stupendous Grammy-winning revival in the 00s.

Canned Heat
More than 40 members have circled through Canned Heat over the last four decades. The band is still around though but the only original member is drummer Fito de la Parra with Larry Taylor and Harvey Mandel occasionally rejoining Canned Heat for select shows.

Mountain
A powerfully heavy band, their three albums released between 1969 and 1972 remain their defining output, although they’ve managed to remain a viable live entity. The raucous “Mississippi Queen” and Leslie West’s penchant for entertaining guest spots will always keep Mountain from slipping into obscurity.

Grateful Dead
Woodstock defined the festival experience and afterwards The Dead redefined the live concert experience. Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995 marked the end of the band; although through Bob Weir’s Ratdog and Phil Lesh & Friends, there is ample opportunity for Deadheads to relive the glory days. Just his past summer, a reformed Dead with all the surviving members toured the U.S.

Creedence Clearwater Revival
Mixing San Francisco headiness with Southern sensibility, CCR created the swamp rock choogle out of thin air. After an acrimonious breakup fueled by discontent with their record company, CCR’s voice, John Fogerty refused to play his old songs out of sheer spite. After being unsuccessfully sued for plagiarizing himself, Fogerty returned to his classic material, making them staples of his live show.

Janis Joplin with The Kozmic Blues Band
Sadly, Janis would be gone a little more than a year after performing at Woodstock with her post-Big Brother band. On her way to becoming a potent live force, Joplin toured Canada with The Grateful Dead and recorded enough material for Pearl, her memorable posthumous release. Despite dying at 27 years old, she lived a historic life and remains the prototype for female blues singers.

Sly & The Family Stone
Destroyed by indulgence, they were pretty much done by the mid-70s, right about the time that their funky sound would have morphed into disco. Stone became a recluse and from the 90s on, his appearances were usually very brief and equally bizarre.

The Who
Keith Moon’s death in 1978 derailed the run of one of the biggest and greatest bands of all time. After a 1982 farewell tour, The Who return in 1989 for a 25th Anniversary tour and would sporadically and lucratively tour for next twenty years. John Entwhistle died in 2002 and in 2006, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend released Endless Wire, a fitting final chapter.

Jefferson Airplane
Along with the Grateful Dead, Grace Slick and company would also perform at Altamont with Marty Balin getting knocked out midset in a scuffle that involved the Hell’s Angels. In 1974, the Airplane became Jefferson Starship and after much legal wrangling morphed into Starship, the Grace Slick led version of the band released the abortion known as “We Built This City.”

Joe Cocker
His revelatory rendition of “With A Little Help From My Friends,” which ultimately became the theme to The Wonder Years became one of his many famous covers. In addition to The Beatles, Cocker would memorably cover The Box Tops, Leon Russell and Dave Mason. He won an Oscar for “Up Where We Belong” and Kim Basinger made his version of “Leave Your Hat On” oh so much more memorable.

Country Joe & The Fish
“Country” Joe McDonald and Barry “The Fish” Melton went as far as a band devoted to protest songs could go. By 1971, they were more interested in appearing in Maverick cinema and in 2001 had to fend off a copyright infringement suit over their most well-known “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die Rag.”

Ten Years After
English blues bands were all the rage in the Woodstock era and Ten Years After remains a leftfield selection on classic rock radio. The band had a nice little run until lead singer and guitarist Alvin Lee became engaged in other projects. Without Lee, the band quietly faded away.

The Band
Robbie Robertson would leave The Band in 1976 and even though most of The Band despise it, The Last Waltz remains one of the era’s defining concert films. They would reform without Robertson in 1983 and play in various iterations until 1999. Richard Manuel would commit suicide in 1986 and Rick Danko would die in his sleep in 1999. Levon Helm’s career has had a recent renaissance, his Electric Dirt released this past June.

Blood, Sweat & Tears
By the time they got Woodstock, Al Kooper had left the band but with David Clayton-Thomas singing lead, BS&T had an early-70s run of jazz-rock albums that retain a certain oddball charm. For those who abhor Isaac Newton, Blood, Sweat & Tears made sure that we knew that what goes up, must come down.

Johnny Winter
After Woodstock, Winter began his move into the category of revered guitarists who never really hit it big yet will be cheered wildly upon being brought on stage by people who probably never heard him play but want to feign familiarity so they can keep their classic rock cred.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
With or without Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash would remain a vital and important cog in the classic rock scene. Their most revered output came in 1969 and 1970, most notably Déjà vu. They will headline one of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame benefit shows this October.

Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Pre-Woodstock, Butterfield was probably best know for being the purveyor of the Chicago blues that backed Dylan’s controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival. Post-Woodstock, the influential harmonica player would do a lot of session work, most notably with The Band.

Sha Na Na
Their appearance at Woodstock helped bring about a revival for 50s nostalgia that resulted in the TV show Happy Days and their own syndicated late70s variety program. John “Bowser” Bauman had the greatest success outside the band, hosting a later-day version of The Hollywood Squares.

Jimi Hendrix
Just over a year after the revelatory performance that ended Woodstock in the wee hours of Monday morning, Hendrix would be gone. Of all the performers that played 40 years ago, none influenced rock and roll to the degree that Hendrix did. There have been and there will be many guitarists that will draw comparisons to Jimi but there will never be another.

Labels: Woodstock